Researching in the Rudolf Steiner Archive (RSA)

The records of the RSA are available for specific research. We kindly ask for an advance notification with details of the respective projects.

The main focus of our holdings lies on the literary and artistic legacy of Rudolf Steiner. These holdings are nearly completely published in the  Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works) and will be electronically accessible from approx. October 2020 through the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Press.

Beside this, the Archive holds collections of published and unpublished memories, reports and biographical descriptions of Rudolf Steiner’s life context, and a collection of anthroposophical secondary literature, which is electronically catalogued in https://baselbern.swissbib.ch

In Rudolf Steiner’s own library (catalogued in Rudolf Steiners Bibliothek – Verzeichnis einer Büchersammlung, Basel 2019) there are many books used and cited by him, also brochures and magazines; complemented by further collections, which serve as references for all authors mentioned or quoted. Diverse legacies, like Marie Steiner’s estate, complete the holdings.

Specially adequate is the RSA for research on the work, action and life of Rudolf Steiner, as for constellations of persons from his childhood and youth till to his time in Vienna, Weimar, Berlin, Stuttgart and Dornach. There are extensive visual and text resources, which can provide an insight of his time, as for example in Vienna or in Berlin around 1900, the turn of the century.

Possible areas of research:

• Correspondence of Rudolf Steiner with his contemporaries, theosophists, anthroposophists and collaborators.
• Contemporary History: Bohème in Vienna, Weimar and Berlin; preliminary history of the first world war; political-economical history of the first world war and its consequences in the post- war time.
• History of the activities for the Threefold of the social Organism.
• Correspondence of Marie Steiner with contemporaries
• History of the origin and development of the art of speech, eurythmy, biological- dynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, Waldorf Pedagogy.

Other archives to be found in the same area are: Goetheanum Documentation, archive, library and art collection; Ita Wegman Archive; Albert Steffen Archive; Forschungsstelle Kulturimpuls (Research Centre Cultural Impulse).