The German Genius

careful description of the individual facts of which it is comprised. In essence, this is what science tries to do. Wittgenstein was saying that we can go no further than that. This is what he implied by his famous last sentence of the Tractatus : “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 23
     
     
    One of the most influential postwar ideas in Europe was released in April 1918, in the middle of the Ludendorff offensive—what turned out to be the decisive event of the war in the West, when General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s Supreme Commander in Flanders, failed to pin the British against the north coast of France and Belgium and separate them from other forces, weakening himself in the process. In that month, Oswald Spengler, a schoolmaster living in Munich, published Der Untergang des Abendlandes , translated into English as The Decline of the West . He had actually written the book in 1914 and used a title he had first conceived even earlier, in 1912, but despite all that had happened he had changed hardly a word of his text, which he was to describe modestly ten years later as “ the philosophy of our time.” 24
    Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg, southwest of Berlin, and grew up in a home steeped in “Germanic giants”—Richard Wagner, Ernest Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Werner Sombart. For Spengler, there were two important personal turning points. He failed his doctoral thesis, which meant he became a writer, not an academic. And second, the Agadir incident in 1911, when Germany backed down after its cruiser, Panther , had sailed into the Moroccan port, bringing Europe to the brink of war. 25 Spengler felt this humiliation keenly and for some reason drew the conclusion that this marked the end of the realm of rational science that had arisen since the Enlightenment. It was now a time for heroes, not traders. He set to work on what would be his life’s project, his theme being how Germany would be the country, the culture, of the future.
    Spengler drew on eight civilizations to sustain his argument—the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Indian, the pre-Columbian Mexican, the classical or Graeco-Roman, the West European, and the “Magian,” a term of his own that included the Arabic, Judaic, and Byzantine. His main theme was to show how each of them went through an organic cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decline, one of his aims being to show that Western civilization had no privileged position in the scheme of things. 26 For Spengler, Zivilisation was not the end product of social evolution, as rationalists argued; instead it was Kultur’ s old age. Moreover, the rise of a new Kultur depended on two things—the race and the Geist or spirit, “the inwardly lived experience of the ‘we.’” For Spengler, rational society and science were evidence only of a triumph of the indomitable Western will, which would collapse in the face of a stronger will, that of Germany. Germany’s will was stronger, he said, because her sense of “we” was stronger; the West was obsessed with matters “outside” human nature, like materialist science, whereas in Germany there was more feeling for the inner spirit— this is what counted.
    The Decline was a great and immediate commercial success. Thomas Mann compared its effect on him to that of reading Schopenhauer for the first time, and Wittgenstein confessed himself “astounded” by the book. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was so impressed that she arranged for Spengler to receive the Nietzsche Prize. This made Spengler a celebrity, and visitors were required to wait three days for an appointment to speak to him.
    From the end of World War I throughout 1919, Germany was in chaos and crisis. Central authority had collapsed, revolutionary ferment had been imported from Russia (though Germany had helped export Lenin from Switzerland), and soldiers and sailors formed armed committees, called Räte , or “soviets.” Whole cities were for a time governed at gun-point. Eventually, the Social Democrats, the left-wing party that installed the Weimar Republic, had to bring in their old foes, the army, to restore order. 27 This was achieved but involved considerable brutality—thousands were killed.
    Against this background, Spengler saw himself as the prophet of a nationalistic resurgence in Germany—he saw it as his role to rescue socialism from the Marxism of Russia and apply it in “the more vital