Oswald Spengler

Independent activity Nationalism 1880–1936 ○ Heart attack

Conservative Revolution thinker whose Decline of the West turned Nietzsche's cultural criticism into a morphology of world history

A Hamburg schoolteacher, he lived from 1911 as a private scholar in Munich on a modest inheritance. The Decline of the West (1918, 1922) treated cultures as organisms that are born, grow and die, and diagnosed Western civilisation as entering its decline. Goethe, he wrote, gave him method and Nietzsche his questions: he carried Nietzsche's concepts of decadence and the will to power into a philosophy of history and became a leading thinker of the Conservative Revolution against the Weimar Republic. He voted for Hitler in 1932 but rejected Nazi racism, and in 1935 he left the board of the Nietzsche Archive rather than accept the Nazi reinterpretation of Nietzsche. Lukács placed him in the irrationalist line running from Nietzsche to Hitler.

Also known as: Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler