Oswald Spengler treated civilisations like organisms with a fixed lifespan
A lonely Munich scholar who owned no books wrote the bestseller of defeated Germany. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West claimed cultures are born, mature and die on a schedule, and forecast that the West would reach its emergency phase around 2000, followed by two centuries of strongman rule.
Spengler was born in Blankenburg in 1880 and grew up in Halle, where a classical school steeped him in Greek, Latin, mathematics and science, and in the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche. His university studies wandered across subjects. His first doctoral thesis, on Heraclitus, failed in 1903 for thin referencing; he passed on a second attempt in 1904. After a nervous breakdown he taught science, mathematics and German history at schools including a Hamburg grammar school, a life biographers describe as uneventful.
His mother's death in 1911 left him a small inheritance, and he withdrew to Munich for good. A heart condition kept him out of the army, and with his money invested abroad he lived in real poverty through the war, tutoring and writing for magazines. The Agadir Crisis of 1911 convinced him a world war was coming and widened his project from Germany to the whole of history. He said the first volume was finished in 1914; it appeared in summer 1918, just before the armistice.
It made him a celebrity overnight. Versailles, depression and hyperinflation seemed to confirm his thesis, and it offered Germans a consoling reason for their fall: vast historical forces rather than their own failings. Thomas Mann likened first reading it to discovering Schopenhauer. Max Weber called him an ingenious, learned dilettante, and Karl Popper dismissed the whole idea as pointless. Historians disliked its openly unscientific method. The second volume came out in 1922, and he turned down a philosophy chair at Göttingen to keep writing.
A German nationalist hostile to the Weimar Republic, he voted for Hitler in 1932 but, after meeting him in 1933, judged that Germany needed a genuine hero rather than a heroic tenor. He rejected Nazi racial biology and antisemitism, and his book The Hour of Decision was a bestseller before the regime banned it. Isolated, he spent his last years collecting ancient weapons and thousands of books, dying of a heart attack in 1936 at 55.
Source: Oswald Spengler
