The Windows of the First Goetheanum

Jannebeth drew the windows of the first Goetheanum as a meditation on their themes.

The windows employed a new kind of engraving in a glass of a single color and were intended to awaken in the 'eye of the soul' an experience of the imaginative world in much the same way as was intended for the ceiling paintings of the small and large domes.

For the art of the Goetheanum is not decoration, nor is it merely art per se — rather is it an art that speaks. Whosoever can understand its language will discover the secrets of the human being in it. Rudolf Steiner called the Goetheanum "the house of the word" not only because the spirit manifesting itself to humanity in the word of anthroposophy resounded in it, but also because all forms and pictures were intended by their own 'language' to open the soul to the spirit, to lead man from sense experience to higher faculties of perception.

Whereas the paintings of the large dome in their colors and images born of the color-worlds pointed to the imaginations of former states of the earth and human cultures, and in the smaller cupola present and future of human development were revealed to the soul through significant pictures, the motifs of the windows show the path of inner development towards an imaginative experience of the spiritual background of man's life of soul.

The starting point for this path is the experience of the image of man's egoity as it is begotten in its primordial form from the macrocosm (center motif of the West window), while the windows on either side remind man that he can only cross the threshold to higher cognition by courageously facing the animality of his own 'abyss' and overcoming it.

The green windows depict the striving soul's relation to the opposition powers — to Lucifer in the South and Ahriman in the North.

The blue windows reveal the foundation of the human power of will, enabling man to arrive at free decisions (in the South window) and the cosmic origin of his head organization for perception and cognition through thinking (in the North window).

The violet windows tell of the soul's descent to incarnation (in the South window) and its re-ascent to the spirit in life after death (in the North window).

Finally, the windows in the color of peach blossom (now rose) reveal the spiritual reality of sleeping (South window) and waking (North window).

In the first Goetheanum, each of the windows was in the form of a triptych so that the eye of the beholder was naturally drawn first to the main motif of the center light and subsequently to that of the left and right.

To see the windows in a meaningful sequence, you should begin with the red window in the West — continuing from here to the green window in the South — then to the green window in the North and so on till you arrive at the peach blossom (rose) window in the North showing the spiritual aspect of man in the waking state, which is after all basic for all Ego development on earth. Only the consciously awake human being can work for the redemption of the earth in the sense of the Christ event by his spirit-filled actions.

In this manner, the path of a spiritualized Platonism as represented by the windows in the South combines with the spiritualized Aristotelianism in the North windows.

Rudolf Steiner on the Goetheanum Windows