Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath, whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history.
37 Facts About Oswald Spengler
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Oswald Spengler is best known for his two-volume work, The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history.
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Oswald Spengler is regarded as a German nationalist and a critic of republicanism, and he was a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution.
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Oswald Spengler strongly influenced other historians, including Franz Borkenau and especially Arnold J Toynbee, and other successors including Francis Parker Yockey, Carroll Quigley, Samuel P Huntington, and Oswald Mosley.
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Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born on 29 May 1880 in Blankenburg, Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire, the oldest surviving child of Bernhard Spengler and Pauline Spengler, nee Grantzow, the descendant of an artistic family.
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Oswald Spengler's elder brother was born prematurely in 1879, when his mother tried to move a heavy laundry basket, and died at the age of three weeks.
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When Oswald Spengler was ten years of age, his family moved to the university city of Halle.
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Oswald Spengler took the doctoral oral exam again and received his PhD from Halle on 6 April 1904.
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Oswald Spengler briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrucken then in Dusseldorf.
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Oswald Spengler lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance.
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Oswald Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness.
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Oswald Spengler owned no books, and took work as a tutor or wrote for magazines to earn additional income.
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Oswald Spengler began work on the first volume of The Decline of the West intending to focus on Germany within Europe.
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Oswald Spengler declined an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Gottingen, saying he needed time to focus on writing.
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In 1924, following the social-economic upheaval and hyperinflation, Oswald Spengler entered politics in an effort to bring Reichswehr General Hans von Seeckt to power as the country's leader.
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The attempt failed and Oswald Spengler proved ineffective in practical politics.
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Oswald Spengler especially pointed to the tendency of Western technology to spread to hostile "Colored races" which would then use the weapons against the West.
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Oswald Spengler met Hitler in 1933 and after a lengthy discussion remained unimpressed, saying that Germany did not need a "heroic tenor [Heldentenor: one of several conventional tenor classifications] but a real hero [Held]".
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Oswald Spengler quarreled publicly with Alfred Rosenberg, and his pessimism and remarks about the Fuhrer resulted in isolation and public silence.
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Oswald Spengler further rejected offers from Joseph Goebbels to give public speeches.
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However, Oswald Spengler did become a member of the German Academy that year.
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On 13 October 1933, Oswald Spengler became one of the hundred senators of the German Academy.
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Oswald Spengler spent his final years in Munich, listening to Beethoven, reading Moliere and Shakespeare, buying several thousand books, and collecting ancient Turkish, Persian and Indian weapons.
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Oswald Spengler made occasional trips to the Harz mountains and to Italy.
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Oswald Spengler died of a heart attack on 8 May 1936, in Munich, three weeks before his 56th birthday.
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Oswald Spengler was influenced by the universal and cyclical vision of world history proposed by the German historian Eduard Meyer.
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The concept of historical philosophy developed by Oswald Spengler is founded upon two assumptions:.
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Oswald Spengler's work became an important foundation for social cycle theory.
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In late 1919, Oswald Spengler published Prussianism and Socialism, an essay based on notes intended for the second volume of The Decline of the West in which he argues that German socialism is the correct socialism in contrast to English socialism.
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Oswald Spengler declares himself resolutely opposed to labor strikes, trade unions, progressive taxation or any imposition of taxes on the rich, any shortening of the working day, as well as any form of government insurance for sickness, old age, accidents, or unemployment.
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Oswald Spengler "provided skeletal Nazi ideas" to the early Nazi movement "and gave them a respectable pedigree".
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In 1934, Oswald Spengler pronounced the funeral oration for one of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives and retired in 1935 from the board of the highly influential Nietzsche Archive which was viewed as opposition to the regime.
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Oswald Spengler considered Judaism to be a "disintegrating element" that acts destructively "wherever it intervenes".
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Oswald Spengler clarifies in The Decline of the West that this is a pattern shared in all civilizations: Oswald Spengler mentions how the ancient Jew would have seen the cynical, atheistic Romans of the late Roman empire the same way Westerners today see Jews.
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Alexander Bein argues that with these characterizations Oswald Spengler contributed significantly to the enforcement of Jewish stereotypes in pre-WW2 German circles.
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Oswald Spengler viewed Nazi anti-Semitism as self-defeating, and personally took an ethnological view of race and culture.
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Oswald Spengler regarded the transformation of ultra-capitalist mass democracies into dictatorial regimes as inevitable, and he had expressed some sympathy for Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist movement as a first symptom of this development.