Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

HISTORY
by
Dr. Eugen Kolisko
History has to do with the past; and that tends to make us feel that it
does not particullarly concern us. How can all the events that have happened
long ago and the people who lived long ago, have any real interest for us?
This attitude towards history is intensified by the way in which it is taught.
But this is only the attitude assumed by the intellect. In teaching children,
or quite simple people, about history for the first time, I have always
found that quite another feeling’s very strongly in evidence; and that is the
great interest that is evinced in this or that individuality or hero—or even in
quite seemingly trivial events in one or another period of culture. Some people
immediately feel their interest and sympathy aroused in hearing about the
Greeks, for instance, or perhaps the Egyptians, or some other civilization.
There are numbers who seriously study some period or historical characters
just as a “hobby.” Others perhaps do not share this interest, or have even a
kind of violent antipathy to certain periods or events.
This approach to history, although a fact, seems to be a very unscientific
one, or a merely personal one, sympathetic or antipathetic. But our “true”
and “objective” historical research is precisely what has brought us to the
position of entirely disregarding this more personal approach. It has collected
the “history of the past”; its documents are before us—sometimes dry, but
certainly” objective.” But the human mind cannot quite come to terms with
such a way of historical research, although it cannot but recognize its extreme
scientific rectitude. If history is really to interest us, we must have so much
enthusiasm and curiosity for some particular person or period or event, that
we identify ourselves with them; especially with the human beings concerned.
Such enthusiasm lifts history out of the past into the present. It is here and
now; it is ourselves.
But whence do we obtain this kind of instinctive approach to history?
What awakens these feelings in us? What are their psychological foundations?
The Greek culture, for instance, has always attracted people, both now
and in the past; but from time to time the interest disappears, only to recur
again later. I have already mentioned this in connection with the Renaissance.
The same thing occurred in the classical time of German literature in
the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Goethe, Holderlin, Schelling,
Winkelmann, and many others, not only write about the Greeks, but even
behave like them; they travel to Italy, seeking the great Grecian works of art;
it is as though they crave-for their whole development-this contact with Greece,
as strongly as one may feel hunger and thirst. How can it be explained?
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