The dramaturgical journal Steiner co-directed from 1898 as a supplement of the Magazin für Literatur and authorized organ of the Deutsche Bühnenverein.
Dramaturgische Blätter in Anthroposophy is the name of the dramaturgical journal Rudolf Steiner co-directed from January 1898 as a supplement of the Magazin für Literatur, the Berlin weekly he edited in his pre-anthroposophical years. Conceived by Otto Neumann-Hofer and authorized by the Deutsche Bühnenverein at its meeting of 17 October to call itself the association's organ, the paper was founded to give permanent, expert treatment to the artistic, technical, legal and social affairs of the German theater. A large part of Steiner's drama criticism of 1898 and 1899 appeared in its two volumes, collected today in Collected Essays on Drama 1889-1900 (GA 29). Steiner terminated the contractual relationship on 1 January 1900. For students of Anthroposophy, the journal documents the practical, institution-building side of his artistic thought, a decade before the Mystery Dramas and two before the Goetheanum stage.
The Dramaturgische Blätter was the working laboratory of Steiner the theater critic. Between 1898 and 1899 he used its pages to argue for a stage answerable to artistic law rather than box-office habit, reviewing premieres, defending playwrights, and weighing questions of theater law and the social standing of actors. The journal shows the future founder of Anthroposophy thinking through institutions, not only ideas.
In Steiner's Own Words
In Germany there is no organ dedicated to the interests of the theater. Such a body appears to be an urgent requirement of the times in view of the fact that the theater has to fulfill one of the most important cultural tasks of the present day. This Dramaturgische Blätter is intended to create such an organ. A permanent and expert treatment of artistic, technical, legal and social theater matters should be offered. Anyone who wants to have a proper say on such matters should have the opportunity to express their views in these journals. The plan for the company originated with the former editor of the Magazin für Literatur, Otto Neumann-Hofer. He asked important experts in the theater business for their opinion on this matter and found approval and a happy response everywhere.
What it Means Today
The questions this journal was built to handle now define a recognized theater profession. The contemporary dramaturg, embedded in a producing theater to research repertoire, advise directors, and connect the stage with its public, is the institutional descendant of what Steiner and his collaborators attempted in 1898: standing, expert attention to the artistic, legal, and social life of the theater. The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by Magda Romanska (Routledge, 2015), gathers scholars and working dramaturgs to map the profession's history and present practice, while the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, founded in 1985, has organized its practitioners for four decades. Read against that landscape, the inaugural program of the Dramaturgische Blätter sounds like an early job description for the field: speech and counter-speech among stage artists, arbitration reports from Dr. Felisch of the Deutsche Bühnenverein, advocacy for the social standing of performers.
Thalira synthesis: the Dramaturgische Blätter is the first place Steiner built what he would later call for in his threefold social thinking, a cultural institution speaking for itself through its own organ rather than through the state or the market, and that line runs unbroken from these Berlin theater pages of 1898 to the stage of the first Goetheanum two decades later.
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