Stronger than Fear

“I’m a German and a Frenchman at the same time.” —J. F. Oberlin

This book is a re-issue of Lisa de Boor's 1956 monograph on John Frederic Oberlin, following facts and dates from the German translation of an Oberlin biography by D. E. Stober (1831). It depicts the life journey of Oberlin, an Alsace farmer, gentleman, and minister as a path of service informed by spiritual development.

Rudolf Steiner commented on Oberlin in a lecture:

“Oberlin lived in Steintal near Strasbourg. This Oberlin was a strange personality, and he worked on souls in a singular way. He was a clairvoyant personality—I can only indicate this—and after he lost his wife relatively early, he was actually able to live with her individuality as one lives with a living person. And thus he made daily notations of what was taking place up where his wife was. He wrote it into a chart of the heavens and showed it to the people around him, so that there was actually a community that participated in the life that Oberlin led with his wife who had died.... Such groups of people are destined to take on certain tasks in later incarnations.” (Occult History, Dec. 31, 1910)

Oberlin was a man of rare spirituality, frequently called “a saint of the Protestant church.”