Ernst Lehrs

German anthroposophist, Waldorf teacher, lecturer and writer, whose best known book, Man or Matter, was first published in London, England in 1951. Together with a number of his student friends, he discovered Anthroposophy in 1920 and had numerous personal meetings with Rudolf Steiner. Together with Wilhelm Rath he contributed significantly to the organisation of the youth conference in which Steiner held the lecture cycle "The Younger Generation" and which led to the founding of an Esoteric Youth Circle. Lehrs describes this in his 1979 autobiography Gelebte Erwartung (Living expectation). After completing his studies he became senior teacher at the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart, beginning a career as an educator first of children and later in adult education. With the rise of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany, he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1935, where he taught in a Waldorf school and then later to Britain. During a short period of internment he met Karl König in 1940, beginning a long relationship between the two. Close ties of friendship connected him with the philosopher and close co-worker of Rudolf Steiner, Maria Röschl, who had been delegated with the task of founding the Youth Section at the Goetheanum. In 1939, they were married in England, pursuing a common commitment to young people and their possibilities of finding meaningful principles in life in our materialistic technological society. In 1952 the couple returned to Germany, where he died on 31 December 1979 in Eckwälden, aged 85. Link to Wikipedia biography