Johannes Tautz

Johannes Tautz (born September 30, 1914 in Koblenz am Rhein; died March 13, 2008 in Dortmund ) was a German historian , religious scholar , anthroposophist , writer and Waldorf teacher . He dealt intensively with a better understanding of National Socialism and with questions about the teaching profession in the 20th century.

Childhood and studies

Johannes Tautz and his younger sister grew up with their father, a self-employed businessman, and their mother, a librarian, in Koblenz, where the painting and drawing teacher Gerhard Schnell, who works at the secondary school, made him aware of anthroposophy. Quickly led a private study group in his home on Rudolf Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy . Through him he heard a first lecture that Hans Büchenbacher gave in the Koblenz Cusanus branch.

Johannes Tautz studied oriental studies , the history of religion and philosophy, "because the Nazi demon had not yet moved in there". He began to study the original spiritual writings in Hebrew , Greek and Sanskrit .

At a summer conference in Dornach he saw Marie Steiner as a spectator at a performance of Albert Steffen's drama The Death Experience of Manes; Günther Schubert and Erich Schwebsch, the later Waldorf colleague, as lecturers and a performance of Steiner's first mystery drama. In 1936 he took part in a priest-sponsored summer conference of the Christian community in the exhibition hall in Cologne , where he met Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock for the first time.

He switched his studies from Bonn to Berlin, where he escaped investigations by the party thanks to frequent room changes. There he was considered "politically unreliable" and only got a temporary study permit. He heard Nicolai Hartmann , Romano Guardini and Eduard Spranger . At Easter 1937 he was able to attend an Easter conference in Dornach and saw a performance of the first part of Goethe's Faust, heard Rittelmeyer speak and had a private conversation with him. In 1938/39 Tautz continued his studies in Tübingen.

At the beginning of the war Tautz was drafted in order to be dismissed as surplus because of the reference to his unfinished studies. He dealt with Schelling 's late philosophy and did a dissertation on Schelling's philosophical anthropology . In this work, he cited two quotes Steiner, resulting in a statement to the imprimatur of these bodies by the Reichsamtsleiter Alfred Baeumler at Hauer Jakob Wilhelm led. After longer investigations, Baeumler expressed himself as follows:

"... These two comments are not about the usual attraction of an author in scientific work, but rather a commitment to the 'reality content of Schelling's conception of nature and spirit' in the sense of Steiner and a commitment to a dark 'source' under which nothing other than anthroposophy can be understood. Mr. Tautz's crude attempt shows how necessary the strictest vigilance is right now. The German universities are not there to support the attempt to stop the lively development of German idealism through a Schelling-Steiner dogmatism. "

War years and rebuilding of the Waldorf school

He experienced the war years as a nightmare and decided to become an educator: "Living with and pitying the events of the time made me aware that after the war Europe would be a question of the art of education that prepared the foundation for a humane society," says his autobiographical Sketch. So Tautz passed the state examination in Marburg .

After the war had expanded into World War II and the American entry into the war, he was called up again, classified as “not suitable for use in the war” and ordered to a clerk's office in Cologne . Here Tautz experienced the bomb carpets with the wildfires. In 1943 he was transferred to Lemberg , where he and his superior, an anthroposophist, wrote Rudolf Steiner's self-education book How do you gain knowledge of the higher worlds? studied. When the troops withdrew, he was without a weapon.

After the German surrender, Johannes Tautz was alternately captured by Czech, American and Soviet prisoners in the vicinity of Prague . In the summer of 1945 he managed to escape to his family in Bad Boll . In Stuttgart he was asked by Erich Gabert to take over German and history lessons at the Waldorf School, which is to be reopened. On November 1, 1945, he was about to start his first ninth grade at the Uhlandshöhe Waldorf School . He met his later wife, who also had a doctorate. They raised three sons in the years that followed.

Encounter with Walter Johannes Stein

Johannes Tautz soon went to see his predecessor, Walter Johannes Stein , in history class at the first Waldorf school . Tautz reports in the prologue of his 1989 biography of Stein: “In August 1951 we met for the first time in London. Stein, who gave around three hundred lectures a year in England, had reserved a few days for the interview and answered the questions willingly. ”When he met Walter Johannes Stein in London, he also met the Royal Air Force officer at the time, the had directed the bombing raid on Cologne.

The conversations with Stein oriented and inspired his further work as a teacher, lecturer and lecturer; as a speaker at national and international teachers' conferences and in the “Hague Circle”, an international group of teachers. He also received special suggestions from Emil Bock on the world's christological history and Jürgen von Grone on the fate of Germany and especially that of Helmuth von Moltke.

1974 Tautz suffered a heart attack and had to quit school; he devoted himself to journalistic, advisory and seminar tasks.

Confrontation with National Socialism, education and Helmuth von Moltke

In 1966 Johannes Tautz had given three lectures on the intellectual background of National Socialism, which later appeared under the title The Intervention of the Adversary - Questions on the Occult Aspect of National Socialism , the first edition in 1976 by Die Kommenden publishing house.

Together with Thomas Meyer, he visited Walter Johannes Stein's daughter, Clarissa Johanna Muller, who was still alive at the time, in Ireland in July 1980, where he got access to his estate. The typescript of Stein's dissertation, with marginal notes by Rudolf Steiner, Steiner's letters and meditations for Stein, his mother and his brother who mysteriously fell during the First World War. Letters and notes from Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz , Eliza von Moltke, Ita Wegman , DN Dunlop and many other personalities were discovered, and it led to the Stein biography of Johannes Tautz in 1989.

In 1980 his little book, Humanity on the Threshold, emerged from lectures . In these explanations, all biographical threshold experiences are related to the archetypal threshold between the physical and the spiritual world. In particular, a haunting apocalyptic look is cast at the end of the century.

In 1993 came the co-edition of Rudolf Steiner's notes for Eliza von Moltke, which until then were only privately circulated and partially known, together with the post-mortem messages and letters to Helmuth von Moltke . The decision to make this publication was to forestall a threatened partial publication without proper commentary. Precursors to this were already contained in the book The Spear of Fate by Trevor Ravenscroft , but in Tautzen's view "without the necessary protection of knowledge for the profound and difficult matter for understanding".

The last publication Teacher Consciousness in the 20th Century - Experienced and Recognized was published in 1995. In addition to an autobiographical description of the life path, it offers a review of the entire school movement since 1919, with brief portraits of the leading personalities in it.

Fonts

• The intervention of the adversary. Questions about the occult aspect of National Socialism. Die Kommenden, Freiburg im Breisgau 1976; New edition: Perseus, Basel 2008, ISBN 978-3-907564-54-7 .
• ed. with Gisbert Husemann: The circle of teachers around Rudolf Steiner in the first Waldorf school 1919–1925. Life pictures u. Memories. Edited by the teaching staff of the Free Waldorf School Stuttgart-Uhlandshöhe by Gisbert Husemann and Johannes Tautz. Free Spiritual Life, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-7725-0669-0 .
• Humanity on the threshold. The apocalyptic language of the century. Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-87838-279-0 .
• Walter Johannes Stein. A biography. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Dornach 1989, ISBN 3-7235-0484-1 .
• Teacher Consciousness in the 20th Century. Experienced and recognized. Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach 1995, ISBN 3-7235-0747-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Johannes Tautz in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Meyer: Obituary for Johannes Tautz. (PDF)
2. ↑ Uwe Werner: Anthroposophists in the time of National Socialism (1933-1945). Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56362-9 , p. 302.
3. ↑ Johannes Tautz: Teacher Consciousness in the 20th Century. Experienced and recognized. Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach 1995, ISBN 3-7235-0747-6 .