Johannes Tautz

His last publication Lehrerbewusstsein im 20. Jahrhundert – Erlebtes und Erkanntes, (The consciousness of the teacher in the twentieth century - Experiences and insights) appeared in 1995. Besides an autobiographic sketch it outlined a reflection of the entire past of the schools movement from 1919 onwards with short portraits of its leading personalities. Finally it elaborates on the three challenges facing every educator who works in the sense of the new understanding of the human being: Wakeful awareness of the spirit of the time; Responsibility towards one's historical conscience and the deepening of anthroposophical knowledge through meditative practice.

In 1993 he initiated the editing of a collection of documents that up to this time had been privately circulated and were only partially known: Rudolf Steiner's letters and notes to Eliza von Moltke together with the post mortem communications and the letters of Helmuth von Moltke himself. The decision to publish these was to prevent or anticipate a partial publication without an appropriate commentary on the subject that had been announced. A previous instance of this content being used had been in the book The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft which, in the opinion of Tautz had been written "without the necessary protection of background knowledge for the deeply-penetrant and difficult to understand material."

Together with a young friend, Thomas Meyer, he visited the daughter of Walter Johannes Stein, Clarissa Johanna Muller, in Ireland where she was living in order to look through her father's literary estate. They found the typescript of Stein's dissertation annotated by Rudolf Steiner, letters and meditations of Steiner for Stein, his mother and for his brother, who fell in a mysterious manner in World War I. Letters and notes of Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, Eliza von Moltke, Ita Wegman, D.N Dunlop and many other personalities were discovered and formed the basis of Tautz's biography of Stein in 1989

After a heart attack in 1974, Tautz had to end his activities as a teacher. From then on he devoted himself to publishing, counselling and work in adult education.

In 1966 Tautz held three lectures about the spiritual background to National Socialism, which later appeared in print under the title Attack of the Enemy: The Occult Inspiration behind Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1976. In it he looks at a number of personalities connected with questionable occult practices with whom leading Nazis had been close during the time of the movement's growth. In 1979 he edited a collection of biographical portraits together with Gisbert Husemann of the circle of founding Waldorf teachers around Rudolf Steiner.

Soon Johannes Tautz decided to look up his "predecessor", the first history teacher at the Waldorf School, Walter Johannes Stein. In the introduction to his biography of Stein, Tautz writes, "In August 1951 the first meeting took place in London. Stein, who held close to three hundred lectures per year, had made several days available for our discussions and readily answered my questions." During the period of his meeting Stein in London, he also met with the previous Royal Air Force officer who had commanded that attack on Cologne.

After the German capitulation, Tautz was imprisoned variously by the Czechs, Americans and Russians but managed to escape in the summer of 1945 back to his family in Bad Boll. He was soon approached by Erich Gabert in Stuttgart to join the Waldorf School that was about to be opened as its German and History teacher. On 1 November 1945 he stood before his first 9th grade at the Free Waldorf School, Uhlandshöhe. Shortly thereafter he met his future wife, who had also completed her PhD. Together they raised three sons.

After the war had turned into a world war with the entry of the United States, he was conscripted once again, was declared to be "not usable for war" and assigned clerical duties in the transport division in Cologne. Here he experienced the carpet bombing attacks and resulting conflagrations. In 1943 he was transferred to Lemberg in the Ukraine, where he joined his superior officer, an anthroposophist, in studying Rudolf Steiner's book on self-education How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. During the retreat he felt secure without any weapon.

He moved from Bonn to the University of Berlin where, thanks to a regular change of rooms, he was able to evade the pursuit of the Party, for he was categorised as "politically unreliable" and could obtain only a provisional study permit. Here he was able to hear the lectures of Nicolai Hartmann, Romano Guardini and Eduard Spranger. On Easter 1937 he participated in a conference in Dornach where the first part of Goethe's Faust was being performed and where he heard and had a personal conversation with Friedrich Rittelmeyer. In the academic year 1938/1939 he continued his studies in Tübingen.

At a summer conference in Dornach he met Marie Steiner in the audience during a performance of Albert Steffen's play The Death Experience of Manes, experienced Günther Schubert and Erich Schwebsch lecturing and saw the first Mystery Play of Rudolf Steiner. In 1936 he attended a conference in the exhibition hall of Cologne carried by the leading priests of the Christian Community where he heard Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock for the first time.

Johannes Tautz (30 September 1914 in Koblenz am Rhein to 13 March 2008 in Dortmund, was a historian, religious scholar, Anthroposophist, author and Waldorf teacher. He concerned himself with a better understanding of National Socialism and with questions of education in the twentieth century.