Donji Kraljevec

His life traced an extraordinary arc from rural Austrian obscurity to the center of some of the most ambitious intellectual and spiritual projects of the early twentieth century, and the path he followed was anything but straight.

Rudolf Steiner was born in eighteen sixty-one in Kraljevec, a small town that was then part of the Austrian Empire and is now in Croatia.

His father was a telegraph operator for the Southern Austrian Railway, later a station master, and the family moved frequently among the small villages and rail stations of Lower Austria.

It was a modest rural upbringing, far from any center of intellectual life, and yet Steiner showed an unusual inwardness and intellectual intensity from early childhood.