Karl Julius Schroeer was the Vienna Goethe scholar and folk-culture researcher whom Rudolf Steiner named as his dear teacher, the living link between peasant tradition and Goethe.
Karl Julius Schroeer in Anthroposophy is the teacher through whom Rudolf Steiner received his lifelong orientation toward Goethe. Born in 1825 in Pressburg as the son of the hidden playwright Tobias Gottfried Schroeer, he directed the Viennese Protestant schools and then held the professorship of German literature at the Technical University in Vienna, where the young Steiner attended his lectures from 1879. In the Berlin lecture of 9 December 1915 (GA 65, From Central European Intellectual Life), Steiner names him directly: “Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher.” Schroeer printed the Christmas plays that the farmers of Oberufer, near Pressburg, had carried for generations, studied Austrian dialects from the Gottschee region to western Hungary, and edited Goethe's Faust across three editions. For Anthroposophy he stands as the figure who joins the roots of folk life to the heights of Goethe's world view, the gesture Steiner turned into a method.
Karl Julius Schroeer holds a place no other scholar holds in Steiner's biography: the teacher who handed him Goethe. In the wartime Berlin lectures on Austrian intellectual life, Steiner describes him working in two directions at once, down into dialect and peasant Christmas plays, up into the Faust research that crowned his life. Anthroposophy keeps his name because Steiner never stopped working in both directions.
In Steiner's Own Words
This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students.
What it Means Today
Every December, Waldorf schools across the world stage the same three folk dramas: the Paradise Play, the Shepherds Play, and the Kings Play. These are the Oberufer Christmas plays, the ones Schroeer heard among the farming families of Oberufer, a village near Pressburg, and printed in 1858 as Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungern before the living tradition could die with its last carriers. Steiner brought the plays into the anthroposophical movement during the war years, and once the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 they settled into the school calendar as a fixed Advent custom. English-speaking schools use the translation by A. C. Harwood, longtime chairman of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, kept in print by Rudolf Steiner Press as The Christmas Plays from Oberufer. One scholar's rescue from 1858 returns as living theatre every year.
The Thalira synthesis: Schroeer stands at the head of Steiner's biography as proof that in Anthroposophy the teacher is not a dispenser of information but a bridge, one person in whom the folk root and the Goethe height meet so that a student can walk from one to the other. Anyone who teaches, in a Waldorf classroom or anywhere else, can take the Schroeer gesture as a working question: what living tradition am I carrying toward my students, and toward what heights does it point?
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