A public manifesto Steiner issued in early 1919, calling for a nation's spiritual, legal, and economic life to be administered as three self-governing spheres.
What is the Appeal to the German People?
The Appeal to the German People in Anthroposophy is the public manifesto Rudolf Steiner drafted and issued in the spring of 1919, known in German as the Aufruf an das deutsche Volk und an die Kulturwelt, the Appeal to the German People and to the Civilised World. It asked readers to put their names to a structural proposal rather than a party programme: that the spiritual life of a nation, its life of rights, and its economic life should each be administered on their own footing, by their own people, under their own law. Steiner had circulated the same argument privately to leading personalities during the war before he made it public, and he treated the Appeal as the short form of the longer book that followed within days, Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, translated as The Crux of the Social Question. Lecturing at Stuttgart on 23 April 1919, he stressed that the Appeal opens with spiritual life and asks there for a complete, even radical, reorganisation.
The Appeal to the German People was not written to win an election. It was written to be signed. Steiner put one structural claim before a country that had just lost both a war and its government: no single sphere of public life should govern the other two. Emil Molt, who ran the Waldorf-Astoria works in Stuttgart, brought the argument to his own workforce on 23 April 1919.
In Steiner's Own Words
You may ask, dear attendees, why do those who represent this appeal not join a socialist party? I would like to answer with a very simple reference: you can be sure that the person who first drafted this appeal has never belonged to a bourgeois party and has never belonged to a bourgeois association, because today all party programs have to be redesigned. This appeal begins with a discussion of intellectual life. For this intellectual life, a complete reorganization is required, even a radical reorganization.
What it Means Today
The Appeal's afterlife runs through a genre it helped invent, the civil-society position paper that argues from structure rather than party. The clearest modern instance is Nicanor Perlas, the Filipino campaigner who published Shaping Globalisation: Cultural Power and Threefolding in 2000 and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2003 for showing civil society how corporate globalisation works and what can be built instead. Perlas took Steiner's three spheres and read them forward into a global setting: the state, the market, and civil society as the carrier of cultural life. His claim that the third of those deserves standing of its own, worked out through the Philippine campaigns against pesticides and nuclear power, repeats the move the 1919 Appeal made. Culture and spirit are not decoration laid over politics and commerce, they are a peer sphere with their own constitution. Where the Appeal asked German readers for signatures, Perlas asked for a seat in trade negotiations, and the structural claim underneath did not change.
Thalira synthesis: the Appeal reads best not as a political programme that failed but as a constitutional proposal that keeps re-entering history whenever a culture notices that its schools, its courts, and its markets are being run by one set of hands.
Take the Appeal's three demands as three questions about any institution: who decides what is taught, who decides what is owed, who decides what is made. When one answer covers all three, the Appeal is describing your situation.
Where to Read More
- The Reorganization of the Social Organism, GA 330
- Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, GA 23
- Find Towards Social Renewal at SteinerBooks
- The First House in Astrology: Identity, Appearance, and the Self
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos