For Spengler the defining moment, which led directly to his book, occurred in 1911. It was the year he moved to Munich, when in May the German cruiser Panther sailed into the Moroccan port of Agadir in an attempt to stop a French takeover of the country. The face-off brought Europe to the edge of war, but in the end France and Britain prevailed by forcing Germany to back down. Many, especially in Munich, felt the humdiation keenly, none more so than Spengler.4 He certainly saw Germany, and the German way of doing things, as directly opposed to the French and, even more, the British way. These two countries epitomised for him the rational science that had arisen since the Enlightenment, and for some reason Spengler saw the Agadir incident as signalling the end of that era. It was a time for heroes, not traders. He now 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. She might have lost the battle in Morocco, but a war was surely coming in which she, and her way of life, would be victorious. Spengler believed he was living at a turning point in history such as Nietzsche had talked of. The first title for his book was Conservative and Liberal, but one day he saw in the window of a Munich bookshop a volume entitled The Decline of Antiquity and at once he knew what he was going to call his book.5
The foreboding that Germany and all of Europe was on the verge of a major change was not of course confined to Spengler. Youth movements in France and Germany were calling for a ‘rejuvenation’ of their countries, as often as not in militaristic terms. Max Nordau’s Degeneration was still very influential and, with no wholesale war for nearly a century, ideas about the ennobling effects of an honourable death were far from uncommon. Even Ludwig Wittgenstein shared this view, as we have seen.6 Spengler drew on eight major world civdisations – the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Indians, the pre-Columbian Mexicans, the classical or Graeco-Roman, the Western European, and the ‘Magian,’ a term of his own which included the Arabic, Judaic, and Byzantine – and explained how each went through an organic cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decline. One of his aims was to show that Western civilisation had no privileged position in the scheme of things: ‘Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return.’7 For Spengler, Zivilisation was not the end product of social evolution, as rationalists regarded Western civilisation; instead it was Kultur’s old age. There was no science of history, no linear development, simply the repeated rise and fall of individual Kulturs. 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 because her sense of ‘we’ was stronger; the West was obsessed with matters ‘outside’ human nature, like materialistic science, whereas in Germany there was more feeling for the inner spirit. This is what counted.8 Germany was like Rome, he said, and like Rome the Germans would reach London.9
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.10 Ludwig Wittgenstein was astounded by the book, but Max Weber described Spengler as a ‘very ingenious and learned dilettante.’ Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche read the book and 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 before he could see them.11 He tried to persuade even the English to read Nietzsche.12
From the end of the war throughout 1919, Germany was in chaos and crisis. Central authority had collapsed, revolutionary ferment had been imported from Russia, and soldiers and sailors formed armed committees, called ‘soviets.’ Whole cities were ‘governed’ at gunpoint, like Soviet republics. Eventually, the Social Democrats, the left-wing party that installed the Weimar Republic, had to bring in their old foes the army to help restore order; 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, concluding that only a top-down command economy could save her. He saw it as his role to rescue socialism from the Marxism of Russia and apply it in the ‘more vital country’ of Germany. A new political category was needed: he put Prussianism and Socialism together to come up with National Socialism. This would lead men to exchange the ‘practical freedom’ of America and England for an ‘inner freedom,’ ‘which comes through discharging obligations to the organic whole.’13 One of those impressed by this argument was Dietrich Eckart, who helped form the German Workers’ Party (GWP), which adopted the symbol of the Pan-German Thule Society Eckart had previously belonged to. This symbol of ‘Aryan vitalism,’ the swastika, now took on a political significance for the first time. Alfred Rosenberg was also a fan of Spengler and joined the GWP in May 1919. Soon after, he brought in one of his friends just back from the front, a man called Adolf Hitler.
From 18 January 1919 the former belligerent nations met in Paris at a peace conference to reapportion those parts of the dismantled Habsburg and German Empires forfeited by defeat in war, and to discuss reparations. Six months later, on 28 June, Germany signed the treaty in what seemed the perfect location: the Hall of Mirrors, at the Palace of Versailles, just outside the French capital.
Adjoining the Salon de la Guerre, the Galérie des Glaces is 243 feet in length, a great blaze of light, with a parade of seventeen huge windows overlooking the formal gardens designed in the late seventeenth century by André Le Nôtre. Halfway along the length of the hall three vast mirrors are set between marble pilasters, reflecting the gardens. Among this overwhelming splendour, in an historic moment captured by the British painter Sir William Orpen, the Allied leaders, diplomats, and soldiers convened. Opposite them, their faces away from the spectator, sat two German functionaries, there to sign the treaty. Orpen’s picture perfectly captures the gravity of the moment.14
In one sense, Versailles stood for the continuity of European civilisation, the very embodiment of what Spengler hated and thought was dying. But this overlooked the fact that Versailles had been a museum since 1837. In 1919, the centre stage was held not by any of the royal families of Europe but by the politicians of the three main Allied and Associated powers. Orpen’s picture focuses on Georges Clemenceau, greatly advanced in years, with his white walrus moustache and fringe of white hair, looking lugubrious. Next to him sits a very upright President Woodrow Wilson – the United States was an Associated Power – looking shrewd and confident. David Lloyd George, then at the height of his authority, sits on the other side of Clemenceau, his manner thoughtful and judicious. Noticeable by its absence is Bolshevik Russia, whose leaders believed the Allied Powers to be as doomed by the inevitable march of history as the Germans they had just defeated. A complete settlement, then, was an illusion at Versailles. In the eyes of many it was, rather, a punishment of the vanquished and a dividing of the spoils. For some present, it did not go unnoticed that the room where the treaty was signed was a hall of mirrors.