The parallel society Rudolf Steiner helped found at Stuttgart in 1923, so that younger members could carry anthroposophy in their own forms.
Free Anthroposophical Society in Anthroposophy is the parallel membership society formed at the Stuttgart assembly of delegates in late February 1923, alongside the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, for the mainly younger members who did not feel at home in the existing Society. Its leadership passed to a committee of eight: Moritz Bartsch, Hans Büchenbacher, Jürgen von Grone, Ernst Lehrs, Rene Maikowski, Wilhelm Rath, Maria Röschl, and J. W. G. Schröder. Between March 7 and 11, 1923 Rudolf Steiner wrote a memorandum of orientation for this committee, preserved in The Fateful Year of 1923 in the History of the Anthroposophical Society (GA 259), directing that admission remain broad-minded while stricter standards governed the narrower communities within it, and that the Society serve as an instrument for spreading anthroposophy through lectures, institutes, and free communities. It arose in the crisis year between the burning of the first Goetheanum and the Christmas Conference; its youth impulse continues today in the Youth Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
The Free Anthroposophical Society answered a generational question: what happens when a spiritual movement's own children no longer feel at home in its forms? Rather than lose the young to drift or revolt, Steiner proposed a second, parallel society with its own admission and its own committee, bound to the old Society through shared institutions and a common central fund, free in everything else.
In Steiner's Own Words
It should be understood that the two groups have come into being only because there are two sharply distinct groups among the members, who both want the same anthroposophy but want to experience it in different ways. If this is properly understood, the relative separation cannot lead to a split, but to a harmony that would not be possible without the separation. 11. The Free Anthroposophical Society should in no way attempt to destroy the historical developmental forces of the Anthroposophical Society. Those who want freedom for themselves should leave the freedom of others completely untouched. The fact that there are imperfections in the old Anthroposophical Society should not lead to further feuding, but to the formation of a Free Anthroposophical Society, which, in the opinion of the leading personalities, avoids these imperfections.
What it Means Today
The clearest way to see what the Free Anthroposophical Society became is to follow its committee of eight. After the Christmas Conference of 1923 refounded the movement as the General Anthroposophical Society, Steiner created a Youth Section within the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in 1924 and called Maria Röschl, one of the eight, to lead it. The parallel society's work passed into a permanent organ of the movement, and the Youth Section still operates from the Goetheanum in Dornach, holding conferences and study programs for people in their twenties. Two more of the eight carried the impulse for decades: Ernst Lehrs taught at the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart and wrote Man or Matter (1950), a landmark English-language study of Goethean science, while Rene Maikowski, who received Steiner's memorandum by hand in March 1923, spent his working life building Waldorf schools.
Thalira synthesis: the Free Anthroposophical Society is Steiner's institutional test of his own Philosophy of Freedom, a wager that one movement can hold two generations who want the same anthroposophy by building two doors into one house instead of forcing everyone through one. Any congregation, lodge, or guild that has watched its younger members quietly stop attending is standing where Stuttgart stood in February 1923, and Steiner's memorandum reads like a working manual for that moment: keep admission broad, let the smaller communities be strict, and let neither group police the other's freedom.
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