About Spengler's teaching

Thomas Mann 1929

About Spengler's teaching is the title of a short essay by Thomas Mann that appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung on March 9, 1924 and whose first book was published in 1925 by S. Fischer Verlag . With the text, the author distanced himself from Oswald Spengler , criticized his main work, The Decline of the West, and thus tied in with considerations from his speech Von deutscher Republik .

Thomas Mann compiled the text from the first of a total of eight letters from Germany , which he had already written in 1922.

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Thomas Mann first praised the literary brilliance of the work as well as the “intuitive- rhapsodic nature of its portrayals of culture” and mentions its sensational effect.

Soon, however, he denied the author the humanistic pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer or the “tragic-heroic” - Dionysian - character of Friedrich Nietzsche , with which the latter removed the opposition between pessimism and optimism . The downfall of the West is rather fatalistic and marked by malicious apodicticity and hostility towards the future, which are dressed in scientific inexorability and have nothing to do with Nietzsche's amor fati . Spengler, the “ defeatist of humanity ”, should not consider himself a descendant of the two philosophers or Goethe with his “hyena-like prophethood” .

Oswald Spengler

With Spengler's conception of cultures, which are "the same" in terms of their general structure and their course of life, but behave like hermetically sealed living beings and know nothing of the others with their own stylistic laws, feelings and thought processes, he contradicts Novalis ' idea, for example . of the “ultimate spiritual unity” and a “higher human dream”, which is the real meaning of the planet.

For Thomas Mann, on the other hand, a “single work of love” like Gustav Mahler's Lied von der Erde throws the theory of radical strangeness between cultures overboard by combining ancient Chinese poetry with the highly developed music of the West to create an organic human unity.

In that man should only strive for what science declares to be necessary anyway, he ceases to really want what is inhuman. The cold scientific doctrine, which for Thomas Mann hides behind Spengler's strangely tormented appearance, also appears secretly conservative to him . Why should one set up a complex structure of thought with its own order, without affirming form and culture and rejecting the "civilizational decomposition"? For Mann, the perversity lies in the fact that Spengler, despite his “secret heartfelt conservatism”, does not approve of culture or fight for its preservation, but rather regards civilization as fatally necessary, i.e. the final state that politically leads to Caesarism and militarism . The cultural man Spengler paradoxically seems to celebrate civilization with fatalistic anger, since everything cultural no longer has any prospect of life for him. In contrast to his "leaden historical materialism", that of Karl Marx was nothing more than "idealistic blue sky."

He learned to write from Nietzsche and copied fatal effects from him without even feeling a hint of the deep essence of the spirit. Out of comfort and imperious lack of love, he smugly searches for laws that he turns not for but against spirit and people. With this smug inexorability, he thinks he is noble, but is nothing more than a snob who teaches something that is not his due. In order to be allowed to represent nature against the spirit - as Goethe did against Schiller - one must, like Goethe, be of "the real nobility of nature."

background

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 (photograph by Gustav Adolf Schultze )

Thanks to Arthur Schnitzler's mediation , Thomas Mann had met the editor of the New York magazine The Dial and agreed on a number of treatises on Germany with him. Between 1922 and 1928 eight of the articles known as German letters appeared , the dollar fees of which stabilized family income during inflation . Thomas Mann also published many of the articles in Germany.

Soon after its publication in 1919, he read The Fall of the West , regarded the work as a kind of spirit and praised it as a “book full of love of fate and the bravery of knowledge”. He recommended it to the jury of the Nietzsche Prize and intended to honor it as the only one demonstratively. If this was not possible, he wanted to enforce a different hierarchy, headed by Spengler, followed by Friedrich Gundolf for his biography of Goethe, Hans Vaihinger and Count Eduard von Keyserling , whose obituary he had to write some time later .

Presumably under the impression of the text Metaphysics and History by Alfred Baeumler, he noted a first distancing in his diary on February 26, 1920.

In his speech Von deutscher Republik on October 13, 1922 , he had not only distanced himself from the thoughts on something non-political , but also expressed himself critically about Spengler's main work. The ingenious and scientific work testifies of enormous potency and willpower and, through its musical composition, reminds one of Schopenhauer's world as will and imagination . His attitude is “nevertheless wrong, presumptuous and comfortable to the point of extreme inhumanity”, which can only be defused by irony , which is not the case here.

In contrast to other authors, Thomas Mann confessed to the Weimar Republic and democracy relatively late , but then appeared as their public advocate and criticized tendencies that opposed the republican-democratic order. However, in contrast to his brother Heinrich Mann , he dealt only little with political issues of the day and concentrated on his literary work. Only occasionally did he fulfill representative duties, such as those resulting from the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature or the establishment of the Poetry Section . He assessed obscurantism as a danger to humanity, which is tired of relativism and strives for the absolute.

Despite his criticism of Spengler, Thomas Mann takes up in his essay Spengler's contrasting culture and civilization , which has its origins in the educational ideal of German idealism. However, man turns against the fatalistic volte of Spengler, who turns to "civilization" out of cultural pessimism. While Mann enthusiastically shares Spengler's diagnosis of doom, he rejects his therapy of “promoting technology and civilization”.

literature

Text output

• Thomas Mann: About Spengler's teaching. In: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 10: Speeches and essays. Part 2, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, DNB 750430176 , pp. 172-180.

Secondary literature

• Missed reconciliation. In: Klaus Harpprecht: Thomas Mann, a biography. Rowohlt, 1995, ISBN 3-498-02873-1 , pp. 432-443.
• Republicans of reason. In: Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-10-028710-X , pp. 43-62.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas Mann: About Spengler's teaching. In: Thomas Mann, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes. Volume 10: Speeches and essays. Part 2, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 173.
2. ↑ Thomas Mann: About Spengler's teaching. In: Thomas Mann, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes. Volume 10: Speeches and essays. Part 2, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 175.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas Mann: About Spengler's teaching. In: Thomas Mann, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes. Volume 10: Speeches and essays. Part 2, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 178.
4. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 2, Commentary on: Letter from Germany, Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 357.
5. ↑ Missed reconciliation. In: Klaus Harpprecht : Thomas Mann, a biography. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 439.
6. ↑ Thomas Mann: From the German Republic. In: Thomas Mann, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes. Volume 11: Speeches and essays. Part 3, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 841.
7. ^ Republicans of Reason. In: Manfred Görtemaker : Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, pp. 55-56.
8. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Comment on Von deutscher Republik. Volume 2: For the new Germany. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 346.
9. ↑ Barbara Beßlich : Fascination of decay . Akademie Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-05-003773-3 , p. 35 f.