Christian Karl - Rudolf Steiner Handbook
Preface
The original German version of this handbook appeared as printed book in 1991/1993.
Since 2007, the electronic version was set into the web as PDF file which everybody can download free of charge. This collection of summaries and quotations was originally intended to provide a view of Rudolf Steiner’s Complete Works (CW, German Gesamtausgabe = GA) for those who wanted to study Steiner’s insights and statements and especially for those who did not have them at their disposal. However, the author does not regard this overview as a kind of “Reader’s Digest." In cases of doubt, he recommends reading the original text or rather translation to recognise the context and its meaning.
The abstracts contain quotations of the so-called memory literature in some cases and comments and references to Blavatsky’s works.
The reader should be familiar with the program Adobe Reader and able to surf within the text to find the abstracts and headwords of interest and benefit of this book that way (see next page).
Several volumes of the Gesamtausgabe are not yet translated, and some translations were not available to the author. In these cases, the author translated the quotations literally. Since the author is not a professional translator, he has to apologise for grammatical mistakes and unsuitable words or phrases. That is why the one or the other sentence may sound strange or be German English. However, the German reader has also often to read sentences or paragraphs several times. For Steiner formed nonce words here and there and used a style intentionally that is sometimes hard to read and somewhat old-fashioned after a hundred years so that some passages are not less difficult to comprehend for Germans.
Nevertheless, the author hopes that this book is a useful means for all who want to study Steiner’s works more or less intensely.
Rudolf Steiner - PDF
Anthroposophy - PDF
