Albert Steffen (1884-1963)

Albert Steffen was a well-known Swiss poet, painter, dramatist, essayist, and novelist. He joined the Theosophical Society in Germany in 1910, and the Anthroposophical Society in 1912 and became its president after the death of its founder, Rudolf Steiner, in 1925. Steffen was chief editor of the society's journal, Das Goetheanum, from 1921 to 1963. His work and estate is preserved at the Albert Steffen Foundation in Dornach, Switzerland.

Steffen wrote many dramas, novels, and essays – many of which have been translated into English. Many of his writings indicated a world permeated by spiritual powers of good and evil, as revealed in old and esoteric European and Asiatic traditions. He considered these various literary works, as well as his somewhat lesser-known paintings and drawings, as “building stones for creating a rejuvenated humanity for a new earth.”

 After secondary school, Steffen moved about from Lausanne to Berlin to Munich, where he became a freelance writer and finished his first novel. He later married Elizabeth Stückgold, the widow of the Parisian painter Stanislas Stückgold, whom Steffen had known already in artistic circles in Munich and about whose artwork and life he wrote a moving review of an exhibition in 1958. In that review, titled “How Art Lends Meaning to Our Existence,” he appreciated how Stückgold could portray a flowerbed musically, “like a sonata” or as if a star were “raying down out of the universe and indeed itself forming the flower.”  Something similar could be said of many of Steffen’s own paintings of flowers.

Already in childhood Steffen was especially interested in herbs and flowers and experienced them very poetically. He later wrote: “As a child it always seemed to me as though a human countenance peeped forth from every blossom. From the tulip, that of a Turkish maiden; from the chrysanthemum, that of a Japanese dancer; from the sunflower of Inca King; from the geranium a Moorish boy.” He grew up in idyllic surroundings along the Aare River in the region of the Jura Mountains, which he later found both spiritually and artistically nourishing and healing.  The deep inner connection to the natural world he experienced was later enhanced by his study of Goethe’s natural scientific writings and cosmically expanded by his acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner, whom he first heard lecture in 1906 and to whom he said he was “indebted beyond all others.” His many paintings of plants and flowers, completed with bright, pure colors and a direct, innocent expression, drew on these inspirations as well as his own heartfelt observations.

In his poetic and somewhat autobiographical book Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life (written in 1910 and 1923) Steffen evoked a devotional understanding of nature.  He described how around the time as a young man he first began to try to paint flowers “suddenly I understood the archetypal plant. I saw how the plant germinates, grows, blossoms and bears fruit, in order to arise ever anew from the seed, through a whole cosmic age according to nature’s laws, and how in so doing it connects the earth with the heavens. In the arrangement of the leaves, in the shaping of the blossoms, in the rising and evaporation of the water, in the coming to fullness and paling out of the colors I discovered a manifold rhythm: tones, counterpoint and accords, the dances of countless spirits.”

Living through two world wars, Steffen was always deeply concerned about the trials of civilization in the mid-twentieth century and dedicated his life and artistic work to serving the healing and higher evolution of humanity. He wrote: “A gardener takes pleasure in his calling only when he feels, present and active within himself, the same life force through which all grows and becomes; when he strives to enhance it. This can only be done by increase of loving care. He must feel deeply within himself that he helps to carry out the Creator’s will. With the poet it is the same, he praises nature when an inner experience has enlarged his vision and made him better.”