VI. Short Biography of Werner Greub
erner
Greub was born on November 30, 1909
in Lotzwil near Langenthal, Oberaargau in the Swiss Canton of Bern. He studied
at a teaching college in Bern, the
capitol of Switzerland,
taught subsequently for 13 years in a school at Lotzwil after which he was
director of a sanatorium for children near Biel
for 7 years. Already at the age of 16 he was introduced to anthroposophy and
became a member of the Anthroposophical Society as soon as he turned twenty
one.
In
his Foreword to this book, he writes that as a student of Rudolf Steiner he was
from the days of his youth aware of the truth of Wolfram’s epic poems. In the
chapter Oransch on
the town of Orange in the South of
France, he makes another personal comment: “I knew the Provence
already for decades before I began, realtively late, to study Wolfram’s Willehalm more thoroughly. As a young man I climbed
the row of seats of the Roman Theatre
in Orange without knowing that I
was in Giburc’s Palace Glorjet. I made canoe trips up and down the canal from Arles
to Port-de-Bouc without knowing that I was paddling on Wolfram’s waterway the
‘Larkant’ and I was standing in the large cemetary Les Alyscamps
without having the slightest notion that I had set foot on Wolfram’s battle
field Alischanz. As
a matter of fact, I had already then studied this necropolis. I read all the
travel-reports and compared them to how the place looked now. It is thanks to
such a travel-report by Mylius that later on, while reading Wolfram’s Willehalm, I
could all at once clearly visualize the place and find the exact location. This
echo by the reading of Wolfram’s battle report of a previous travel experience
prompted me to do research into the other settings of the Willehalm plot.”
This
karmic resonance in Greub’s life between his inner and outer experiences
occurred again during World War II, when as a Major in the Swiss Army he was
stationed from 1940 –1941 with 200 soldiers in the Goetheanum building that was
requisitioned during the war to serve as a militairy headquarter. Especially at
the begining of this war, there was namely a real danger that the Nazi’s would
also invade Switzerland.
Greub’s task was to reconnoitre the
hilly area around the Goetheanum with its many rocky caves and ponds for
defense purposes, the same area thus that he was later to identify as Wolfram’s
Terre de Salvaesche, where in the ninth century the Grail knights or Templeisen
(not to be confused with the Templars from the 12th century) had the
task of defending the Grail Temple from potential invaders.
In
1954, Werner Greub became a vocational guidance counsellor in Basle.
His most important book in this field Berufswahl –
Modellversuche, based on the work of Goethe, appeared in 1961. In
1974 he retired as head of the Vocational Guidance Department in Basle
and devoted from then on all his time to his Wolfram and Grail research.
The
last time that I spoke to him – no longer personally but on the phone – he said
he was concentrating his research on Casper Hauser. In the weekly Das Goetheanum, the organ of the General Anthroposophical Society in
Dornach, Nr 11, June 8, 1997
there appeared a public notice of the death of this old “Grail Knight” in Stuttgart,
Germany signed by his
friends and Family. It read (in part): “Our dear friend Werner Greub has,
unexpectedly at noon on May
12, 1997, returned from a rich life [on earth] to the spiritual
world.” There was no announcement then, or later as far as I know, by the
Council as is usually the case at the death of prominent anthroposophists.
Sometime later an obituary appeared in the supplement for members of Das Goetheanum, Nr 31, October
26, 1997 by Ellen Schalk, a woman friend who nursed him in his old
age. (His wife had died in 1990). In my memory he lives on as one of the most
knightly, yes chivalrous men I have had the honor to meet and work with. His literary
estate he left to his family. One of his sons, Dr. Marcus Greub, a lecturer at the Goetheanum, is presently editing
and revising his father’s work and hopes to start publishing it in the near
future. (RJK)
Update November
24, 2004: In 2003 vol.
2 of Werner Greub’s Grail trilogy Von Parzival zu Rudolf Steiners Wissenschaft vom Gral
(From Parzival to Rudolf Steiners Science of the Grail) was privately published
by M. Greub in Switzerland
and in 2004 the remaining volume appeared in two parts entitled Erwachen am Goethe
(Waking up with Goethe).