German director Rudiger Sunner spent 110 minutes trying to answer a question most people who know the word Waldorf have never asked: what did Rudolf Steiner actually believe, and does it still matter. Released on DVD in April 2008 through absolut Medien, Abenteuer Anthroposophie, Rudolf Steiner und seine Wirkung, follows Steiner's biography from provincial Austria through Vienna and Weimar to the Goetheanum he built at Dornach, Switzerland, the anthroposophical movement's architectural and spiritual center.
Sunner does not stop at biography. He visits Waldorf schools in Germany and in Africa and an anthroposophically run farm in Egypt to show what Steiner's ideas became once they left his own writing: a pedagogy, a system of biodynamic agriculture, an approach to medicine and architecture that together make up a movement still active a century after its founder's death in 1925. The film gives space to both defenders and critics, tracing what its own description calls Steiner's occasionally bizarre and sometimes antisemitic racial theorizing back to the folk beliefs and mystical currents of late nineteenth century Vienna, without setting that history apart from the pedagogy it also documents approvingly.
The result is neither an advertisement for the Anthroposophical Society nor a takedown of it, but an attempt to hold a genuinely contested legacy in one frame: a man whose ideas built working schools and farms on several continents, and whose racial theories the film refuses to leave out of the account.