The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Editorial Epilogues
to Goethe's Scientific Writings
GA 1f

Although the Kürschner edition (GA 1) described itself as “historical-critical” on the title page, it was designed as a reading edition. Here Steiner had the opportunity to explain his views on the edition in detailed introductions and commentaries.

Steiner was not able to explicitly incorporate all these content-related aspects into the Weimar edition. This is because neither content-oriented introductions nor explanatory comments were planned for this edition. It was conceived as a purely historical-critical edition of Goethe's texts. The aim was to make all of Goethe's texts, both those already published and those from his estate, available to the academic public in a relatively short period of time. This was achieved, and apart from a few index volumes, was actually completed before the First World War. If commentary had been included, this undertaking would probably have taken much longer, or more realistically, it would probably never have been completed and would have been abandoned, like some other editions from later periods.

Steiner was unwilling to commit to an edition based purely on textual criticism. He had made this clear enough in his Kürschner edition. In the Weimar edition, however, he could only express his views on content through the selection and arrangement of Goethe's writings. This clearly contradicted the principles of the edition, where only the criteria of text genesis and chronology, but no considerations of content, were to play a role in the selection and arrangement. Shortly after Steiner began work in Weimar, this led to disputes with the archive director Bernhard Suphan, but Steiner was able to prevail with his arguments for a selection and arrangement based on factual considerations, which was recorded in a mutual agreement — an astonishing fact. This can only be explained by the particularly complex and very specific situation surrounding the transmission of the scientific legacy, with its text fragments of varying quality, and by the fact that the editors, none of whom were scientists, did not allow themselves to make their own judgments in this matter. Suphan also had his editorial colleagues expressly approve the exception for Rudolf Steiner in writing.

GA 1f, the present volume, contains the introductory texts written by Rudolf Steiner from the six volumes of the Weimar Goethe edition (1891-1896), as well as the titles and tables of contents of these volumes, because the specific selection and arrangement of Goethe's texts in the Weimar edition can be traced back to Rudolf Steiner.