Hans-Hasso von Veltheim
Hans-Hasso Ludolf Martin von Veltheim-Ostrau (born Cologne October 15, 1885, died Utersum August 13, 1956) was a German Indologist, Anthroposophist, Far East traveler, occultist and author.
He was the son of the royal Prussian lieutenant colonel and landowner Franz von Veltheim (1856–1927), laird of Ostrau and Weissandt and Anhalt ducal chamberlain, and his first wife Klara Herbertz (1860–1925) from Cologne.
He was a friend of authors like Hermann Kasack, Hans Henny Jahnn and Grigol Robakidze who wrote books when Veltheim's guest at Ostrau.
Outside Ostrau and on his travels he came into contact with personalities such as Mahatma Gandhi, Aristide Briand, Anthony Eden, Walther Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, with numerous scientists and artists such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Richard Strauss, Arno Breker and Oswald Spengler.
He had the castle extensively renovated and furnished with his collections of antiques, expressionist paintings (such as Marsden Hartley's Light House) as well as ethnological objects from all over the world.
Until the Second World War, he turned his home into a meeting place for scientists, writers, artists, esotericists, politicians, musicians, dancers, and numerous visitors from Asia, especially India.
Initially his interests revolved around China, which he was never to set foot in and whose art and philosophy he was taught by the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, but gradually India came to the fore, especially through theosophical and spiritual contacts.
Through Annie Besant who called the gigantic grand-seigneur „my crusader“, he came close to theosophy, especially to the world savior, whom she temporarily postulated, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who stayed in Ostrau for a week in 1931.
But he also maintained good contacts with influential politicians of the Weimar Republic, such as the President of the Reichstag Paul Löbe and a number of cabinet ministers, as well as with domestic and foreign diplomats who visited and invited him.
After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, numerous members of his circle of friends emigrated from 1933, like the dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Kurt Jooss or the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and the anthroposophist Eugen Kolisko, others were harassed by the Nazi regime.
He had to return to Germany via Egypt, Libya, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands (where he once again visited the exiled Emperor Wilhelm II, whom his mother had known well).
He provided spiritual support to his cousin Elisabeth von Thadden in letters before she was executed as a resistance fighter against the Nazi régime in September 1944, as was his close friend Carl Wentzel.
Despite the strictest ban, Veltheim continued to visit the president of the umbrella organization of German Jews in Berlin until the end of 1942 and had food delivered to him until his deportation in January 1943.
His urn was brought back to Ostrau in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and buried in a crypt chapel in the Castle Church, which he had converted into an anthroposophical meditation room in 1933.
