Johannes Tautz

Johannes Tautz (1914–2008), born in Dortmund, Germany, was a historian, religious scholar, anthroposophist, author, and Waldorf teacher. He concerned himself with a better understanding of National Socialism and with matters of education in the twentieth century. Tautz took up Eastern studies, religion, and the history of philosophy when "the National Socialist demon had not taken these over yet." He studied ancient spiritual texts in their originalHebrew, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. At the start of World War II, Tautz was called for military duty but was dismissed on account his incompleted studies. His was occupied with the later philosophy of Schelling and submitted his dissertation, "Schelling's Philosophical Anthropology," in which he used two citations of Rudolf Steiner that led to the official prohibition of Anthroposophic work in Germany at the time. Together with a young friend, Thomas Meyer, he visited the daughter of Walter Johannes Stein, Clarissa Muller, in Ireland, where she was assessing her father's literary estate. They found a copy of Stein's dissertation annotated by Rudolf Steiner, letters and meditations from Steiner for Stein, his mother and for his brother, who fell in a mysterious way 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.