On the new Edition of the “Agriculture Course” Ueli Hurter
In the last Circular we reported in detail on the new edition of the “Agriculture Course”. The project is running well and we may hope with good reason that the finished work will be available at the coming agricultural conference at the beginning of February 2022.
Where is the original shorthand version of the “Agriculture Course”? The question is preoccupying and unsettling all those who have taken on the task of the new edition. And just as our predecessors fared, so we too were faring: it is not to be found. The shorthand notes of Kurt Walter on the basis of which the first edition was made within a few months of the Course are lost without trace. That is not a good starting point for research into the sources; but that is the situation. Accordingly, then, other shorthand notes of people present, typescripts and earlier editions gain all the more importance. How the situation is for each lecture is reported precisely in the new edition in an accompanying editorial text.
Nonetheless, the search for the original documents and the hope of still finding them has accompanied all the work on the new edition. Now in the cellar of the Rudolf Steiner Archive there is the actual collection of files. In one of these drawers the notebooks of Lili Kolisko are to be found. Decades ago they were acquired by the Rudolf Steiner Archive as a purchase of part of Kolisko’s estate. Kolisko mastered shorthand and, in fact, in one of her notebooks the shorthand version of lectures five, six, seven and eight of the Agriculture Course are there! This was known, but only gradually did the current editorial group realise the full significance of this record. Could it be transcribed afresh? Somehow this seemed an undertaking of the greatest difficulty, because it is the Gabelsberg shorthand, and there appeared to be no-one left among those connected with the Archive who thought they were capable of transcribing such shorthand notes into longhand. In the past there had been talk of several thousand Francs that it would cost, should anyone be able to do this.
This seems part and parcel of this archive world: there are secrets, shadowy zones and hazardous paths into unknown depths. Finally, the man who masters this shorthand is found, after all; he is prepared to carry out the transcription, and after a few weeks it is available at a price that is much lower than supposed.
The new transcription is most carefully compared to all the text variants available. In several passages we thus come to other possible text variants than in the editions so far; it is exciting but not actually sensational. The sensation, somehow hoped for, but also feared, does not happen. The text of lecture eight largely corresponds to the fundamentals, including the shorthand of Kolisko. A letter from Ehrenfried Pfeiffer to Günther Wachsmuth, in which he writes to his colleague he has compared the text of the first edition with Lili Kolisko’s shorthand and has made appropriate notes by hand, gains its full significance. Thus, it is evident that in the second edition – and thus also in all following editions – Kolisko’s shorthand notes have been taken into account.
So far, so good. Now there is the gap of lectures one, two, three and four in Kolisko’s hand. She will have taken down these lectures just like the second half. Where are these shorthand notes? The relevant notebook is to be found neither in the Rudolf Steiner Archive nor in the Archive of the Goetheanum. Where could it be? From a certain point in time Koliskos lived in England and died there. And from the mists of the past there emerges the saga of a Kolisko archive in a barn in Wales. Now it becomes exciting like in a thriller: a landscape shrouded in mist, in it a pretty dilapidated barn, a creaking door, dimly-lit, boxes and racks full of books, laboratory utensils, pages of notes...Your imagination runs a bit wild.
We are thinking we would actually need to try everything to get hold of this notebook, for you can just imagine: we print the new edition and three months later Kolisko’s shorthand notes of lectures one to four turn up and people find a key discrepancy with the present text! Therefore, the simplest thing is: we travel to the place of the supposed treasure and try everything to get access to it. But it is April 2020 – Corona lockdown everywhere. Travel is out of the question; then it is emails and telephone calls. And lo and behold: one of the contact people in England is a person close to us from our youth, a friend from long ago – and she is closely related to the owner, a descendent of Eugen and Lili Kolisko. We think a door is opening; but no. Our concern seems to be seen as not so urgent as it is for us. Dornach does not enjoy the best reputation everywhere... Our request does not meet a clear no, but less still a clear yes.
In a further step we hear that the archive in Wales is about to be broken up. It is to be handed over to another archive. Our repeated telephone requests are met with understanding, but the uncertain outcome of the sought-for notebook with the shorthand remains in the balance. Time is pressing, the date for handing in the manuscript of our ninth edition is getting nearer. Should we postpone it or run the risk of publishing it without viewing this shorthand? And then, all of a sudden a notebook from Kolisko is lying in our hands with notes on lectures one and two, on loan, brought to us by an individual who goes in and out of the archives and has a special feeling for important records.
Now it is down to the transcription of the notes – partly longhand, partly shorthand – into fair copy. And indeed something comes up that can be called a big fish. In lecture two there is mention of the “cosmic-qualitative analysis”. A mysterious term, with which a lot of people have concerned themselves intensively and to which many have become attached. However, with Kolisko it is “cosmic-quantitative analysis”. The first reactions were: the perfect surprise; impossible! Yet it is written there! A glance at the notebook shows that the term was written by Kolisko in normal handwriting. Hours of exciting conversation follow. Which variant is correct? The result of our group’s assessment is in the following text of the note of the passage mentioned above:
This example is just one of many, simply a very clear one. This report of the exciting side of the editorial work is meant to awaken people’s curiosity about the ninth edition, soon to be available. Many more hours have gone into the meticulous comparison of texts, but there are not such exciting stories to tell of them. In any case, it was always our goal with the new edition to provide the sources in as pure a form as possible, on the one hand, in order to do full justice to the author, Rudolf Steiner, as much as we can, and, on the other hand, to offer all our readers, students and researchers a good basis for their work.(cosmic-quantitative) analysis: a change by the editors on the basis of the Kolisko notes; there it appears as “cosmic-quantitative analysis”. In all the previous editions it was written as “cosmic-qualitative analysis”. Content-wise both variants are possible. In the typescript “kosmische” is changed in handwriting to “kosmisch”. See too in the lecture of 13th June 1924 of the existing volume the term of “quantitative chemical analysis”. With “cosmic-quantitative” see too Rudolf Steiner’s remark on 5th February 1924 in the Stuttgart College Meetings, “Cow dung! Horse dung is not good. It must be carried out rationally as well as it can be done financially. In the end it is so for a limited area that the whole harmony will not result, unless a certain number of cattle are there on the area of land and certain quantity of plants. These cattle then give the dung, and if more plants are there than the cattle give dung, then these are unhealthy proportions”. (from Rudolf Steiner: The First Teachers’ Course, GA 300c, 2020). The term cosmic-qualitative analysis is frequently related to the cow’s process of digestion. Compare too Rudolf Steiner’s description of the ruminating cow of 27th January 1917 in “Goethe’s Faust in the Light of Anthroposophy”, GA 273, Steiner Books 2016. It is written there, “What is the animal’s soul actually doing, when it is digesting? The soul takes part in what is happening in its body with a boundless feeling of well-being. It lies there and watches itself while it is digesting. It looks at itself with a boundless sense of well-being; the sense of well-being with the animal is really tremendous. It is interesting to see a cow, for instance, digesting, in a spiritual picture, when it lies there and now all the processes that are taking place become really inwardly visible for it when the substances in the food are absorbed in the stomach and then are transported from the stomach to the other parts of the body. The animal watches this with the most inward feeling of well-being, because there is an intimate correspondence between its astral body and its etheric body. The astral body lives in what the etheric body mirrors of the physical-chemical processes, through which the substances in the food are passed into the organism. That is a whole world which the cow sees! Admittedly, this world only consists of the cow and the processes that take place in the cow”.