Steiner's name for the souls born near 1900 who carry new pre-earthly impulses and speak a different soul-language from the generation of intellectualism.
The Younger Generation names the post-1900 souls whom Steiner addressed in his 1922 Youth Course at Dornach. He held that they are inwardly unlike the generation before them, having brought from pre-earthly existence an impulse the older, intellectualised age could no longer feel. Where the elders spoke in cliche and convention, the young longed for a thinking warmed by the heart, and for community recovered from beneath the empty phrase.
In Steiner's Own Words
Young people in the twentieth century feel these things; they have been seeking but found only chaos. These things cannot be portrayed by writing up external history. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a crucial point in the inner development of mankind. Souls who were born shortly before or shortly after the turn of the century are of quite a different inner make-up from those who were born even during the last third of the nineteenth century. One can speak about this if, in spite of the years piling up, one has not allowed oneself to get old.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these thirteen lectures into a live movement, not an abstraction. The Wandervogel, the wandering-bird youth movement founded in 1901 in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz by Karl Fischer and his fellow students, had by 1922 grown into hundreds of thousands of young Germans who left the lecture hall and the parlour for the forests, singing old folk songs and rejecting the convention of their parents. Steiner read this exodus as a soul-symptom, not a hiking fashion. The young, he said, had fled the dragon of dead intellect into regions poor in air, and a true youth movement would only reach its goal when, instead of the dragon, the younger generation found in Michael the forces to overcome it.
The practical heir is the upper-school work of Waldorf education, whose first school had opened in Stuttgart in 1919, three years before this course. Steiner's claim there is that adolescence is the threshold where inherited concepts must be re-earned through the student's own judgement, the very self-education the Youth Course describes. Thalira synthesis: the gulf Steiner named is less a quarrel between age groups than a difference in soul-language, and the bridge across it is built not by argument but by the older generation learning, again, to think with the heart. Read this way, every recurring complaint that the young no longer speak our language becomes a question about whether the elders still warm their own thought.
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