Articles
All articles on this site are written in German. Here you will find an English summary of each, with a link to the original. The titles in English are my translations. New articles appear roughly every two weeks, occasionally more often.
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Redemption as a path? The Mystery Dramas and messianism
The years around 1900 were full of messianic expectation. The article distinguishes Steiner’s talk of the reappearance of Christ in the etheric — a change in human perception, not the arrival of a person — from the messianism of his time, looks at Theodora’s vision in The Portal of Initiation, and sets the plays beside the conflict over Krishnamurti, in the course of which the Anthroposophical Society was founded.
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Steiner among his contemporaries — Schuré, Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal
The Mystery Dramas as theatre of literary modernism: Édouard Schuré as a forerunner, Maurice Maeterlinck and Hugo von Hofmannsthal as neighbours and counterpoles. The plays ask the same questions as their contemporaries — how theatre can show the inner life, what language can still achieve — and answer them in their own way, with a drama of conversation that makes knowing itself the dramatic event.
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Not a closet drama — how I came to the stage of the Mystery Dramas
From a first reading through the Goetheanum performance of 1989 to many years of dramaturgical advice: a personal account of why the mystery of these plays lies in language and conversation, and why they need the stage.
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Johannes Thomasius — portrait of a developing figure
Johannes Thomasius is the central developing figure of the four plays: from the painter who follows Maria, through the retrospect into an earlier life, to the self-knowledge before the Guardian of the Threshold and the meeting with his Double.
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Mirror metaphors in the Mystery Dramas
Why the plays again and again let their characters meet themselves — as a Double, as an earlier life, as a higher self. Where Romantic literature made the encounter with one’s double an image of terror, the Mystery Dramas make it the condition of knowledge. Based on my doctoral thesis (Basel 2005/2006).
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The four dramas at a glance
An introduction for new readers: titles, first performances and the core of each of Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas. Also available in English: The Four Mystery Dramas.
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A new start: why this site is coming back to life
A look back at the first articles of 2022 and an explanation of why mysteriendramen.ch is now being continued regularly.