Years of decision

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Years of decision. Germany and the Development of World History is a political-philosophical work by Oswald Spengler . It was published by CH Beck in Munich in 1933. The philosopher's lecturing work carried out preparatory work for it. Spengler's lecture Germany in Danger (February 3, 1930, before the Patriotic Society in Hamburg) corresponds with the years of the decision .

Context of National Socialism

History of origin

Dictation, writing and printing essentially take place in 1932. At that time Spengler still intended to name the book (analogous to his lecture) Germany in danger . According to Spengler, printing had progressed to page 106 of the first edition when the National Socialists took power in the German Reich on January 30, 1933 . Spengler left the text untouched, but changed the title to avoid misunderstandings:

"Only I chose the title differently so as not to create misunderstandings: It is not the seizure of national power that is a danger, but the dangers were there, some since 1918, some much longer, and they persist ... [.. .] My fear for Germany has not diminished. "

Anti-Nazi tendency

The circumstances of Hitler's seizure of power did not leave an impression on Spengler, the precise political observer of his time. Nevertheless, the philosopher (sensational for readers of the time) is quite skeptical and reserved about the 'movement'. Although he conceded some potential for further effectiveness to the Nazi party, at the same time he said that the dangers had by no means diminished through the national revolution.

Spengler does not like the ostensible political effect that infiltrated politics with the takeover of power. In this the philosopher senses the pernicious attitude of the dilettante. In addition, Spengler considers the grand talk and the pose of the gentleman to be inappropriate. “Right thoughts are exaggerated by fanatics to the point of self-repeal. What promised great things at the beginning ends in tragedy or comedy. ” Spengler bluntly denounces the brown movement of the fanatical and therefore politically dangerous attitude.

Spengler's perspective view over the centuries of world history is also not comfortable with the Nazis 'lack of sense of reality and the Nazis' prejudice in their ideas of the moment. He diagnoses a lack of sobriety, which is the order of the day in politics:

"And the National Socialists believe they can be done without and against the world and build their castles in the air without at least a silent but very palpable counteraction from outside."

Rejection of racial ideology

Spengler defends himself against the biological concept of race and against the anti-Semitism based on it . The years of the decision contain the following clarification:

“Racial unity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that all tribes and species have mixed for thousands of years (...) Whoever speaks too much about race has none. It does not depend on the pure, but on the strong race that a people has in them. "

These sentences contain at least a partial rejection of the biological racial madness. Moreover, they implicitly deny the Nazis the qualification of a speech about 'race'; because only they can be meant by those 'who talk too much about race'.

Philosophical basics

Spengler's ideological foundation essentially corresponds to the specifications of his main work The Downfall of the Occident (1918/1922) and Man and Technology (1931). However, it is getting worse, which is probably due to the continual worsening of the western civilization crisis.

Philosophy of life

Spengler understands 'race' as the life impulse of a human community that propagates through history (in children or in integrated persons).

Spengler, with his role model Friedrich Nietzsche , advocates a pessimism of strength that sets itself apart from that of the cowardly and tired. Life is constant war , even if not always in the form of physical violence: "Man is a predator" , and "The fight is the fundamental fact of life, is life itself" . The affinity of such ideas with those of traditional 19th century social Darwinism cannot be denied.

Cyclical cultural development

Spengler's morphologically founded philosophy of history (especially Art. Oswald Spengler ) is based on the necessary disintegration of all high cultures. The philosopher is recording this decline for the West right now, in the 20th century. It corresponds to the time of late antiquity, from the Second Punic War (218–202 BC).

Europe is entering the age of world wars , with which the development of its culture will irrevocably close. According to Spengler's gloomy prognosis, the 20th, perhaps also the 21st century, brings with it unimaginable catastrophes, as far as the purely warlike side of events is concerned. Spengler, however, does not speak of these gloomy prospects with a shudder, but rather with the pride of those who “feel lucky to be there” .

Transition to civilization

For Spengler, the distinction between culture and civilization means that after about 1000 years every culture passes into its senile final state, 'civilization'.

How the fate of the West will be fulfilled is therefore not certain in every detail. Spengler believes that despite all the signs of decay, there is still hope of activating the said primordial impulse, especially in the currently buried Viking souls of the population of Western Europe.

The political horizon

Spengler criticizes his contemporaries for a profound lack of insight into the real political situation. Germany in particular suffers from a highly provincial heritage. The horizons of the elites in the other Western European countries are hardly any better. Spengler speaks, drastically enough, of the comprehensive "insignificance of the leading statesmen" , a heavy burden for future world politics.

Global analysis

Europe has ceased to be the politico-military center of the world.

Russia is beginning to free itself from the western, the Petrine pseudomorphosis . Asia now extends back to the Vistula . This puts Germany in the role of a cultural border country towards the east.

The United States of America provide for Spengler on the other side of the globe an emerging power. The philosopher behaves somewhat cautious in the assessment, as far as their future prospects.

In addition, for Spengler the threat of a new self-confidence is growing among the "colored people (Third World) who no longer want to endure the predominance of whites" .

Prehistory of the crisis

The European pentarchy of the 19th century had already carried the seeds of the self-tearing of the Faustian peoples of Western Europe. In principle, the First World War could have started in 1878 because of the Balkan crisis. Only a superior diplomacy (especially Otto von Bismarck ) at the Berlin Congress prevented it, but postponed it to the future and only increased its force.

According to Spengler, the First World War itself did not have a clear winner. He didn't really make a decision on the basic question of supremacy. France alone is still indulging in this illusion.

The winners of the First World War were workers' parties and unions:

“The labor leader won the war. What is called the workers' party and trade union in all countries, in reality the trade union of party officials, the bureaucracy of the revolution, has conquered the rule and now rules western civilization. "

Forecasts

Against this background, Spengler predicts the coming battles for world domination. This includes an insight into the emerging East Asia, especially Japan .

In contrast, Spengler attested France and England an internal weakness. England is currently falling from its rank as a world power. The legacy of the former 'grande nation' in the Mediterranean and North Africa is believed to have fallen to Mussolini's fate . (Spengler was wrong on this point.) However, the philosopher also writes, amazingly clairvoyant:

"Perhaps we are already close to the Second World War with an unknown distribution of powers and unforeseeable - military, economic, revolutionary - means and goals."

The white world revolution

Russian Bolshevism

Spengler considers the Bolshevik regime in Moscow to be a primitive form of despotism - not because of the Marxist imports from the West, but because of the tradition of the Asian steppe, which goes back to Genghis Khan . For Spengler, the rulers in the Kremlin are the offspring of “a ruling horde - called the Communist Party with chiefs and an all-powerful Khan and a hundred times as numerous, defenseless masses. There is very little of real Marxism except in names and programs ” .

Spengler therefore considers the communist rule in Moscow to be the dazzling work of history. In truth, little would change if Russia one day abandoned the communist principle.

nihilism

Spengler dates the occidental world revolution far back; he saw it at work as early as the 19th century. Spengler examines the overturning movement, characteristic of his thinking, in a sideways glance at the analogous processes of antiquity , especially the time from the Gracchi to Sulla .

Spengler also does not interpret the revolution in terms of economic or social issues, but in the light of the idea of ​​the primacy of culture. Revolution is a symptom of the collapse of culture. It emerges from the turn towards civilization, metropolitan intelligence and the rationalism of the later times. Every living culture is hierarchically structured, but revolution denies this reality of life and promotes the leveling of society - not towards equals and equals, but towards an informal mass.

Spengler resorts to Nietzsche's condemnation of the revolution. “The building of society” should “ be leveled down to the level of the mob with their help .”

Instrumentalization of the social

Spengler considers the 'social question' to be artificially exaggerated. They serve as a propaganda tool to declare the workers to be ' proletarians '. It is fatal that this interpretation is still accepted by the bourgeoisie.

For Spengler, socialism is nothing but lower-class capitalism : a mere change of perspective under otherwise the same 'exploitative' auspices. Only that under the pressure of the dictatorship of the proletariat all other social classes (the peasant and bourgeois) are exploited.

Dictatorship of the workers' parties

In the early 20th century, the workers' parties and trade unions had de facto power for Spengler. Characteristic of the 'politics' of decomposition are above all an excessive overestimation of lower work, brutal interventions in economic life and horrific wage increases and reductions in working hours. According to Spengler, the bill has to be paid by society, the peasantry, the simple craftsmen and overall the vitality of the state.

Economic disaster

Spengler sees the world economic crisis (since 1929) as a direct consequence of the white world revolution. The additional annual burden due to increases in wages, taxes and social contributions is simply not manageable. (What Spengler is describing basically 'only' points to the beginning of the modern social and welfare state .)

The catastrophe is also taking place through the migration of industrial potential to what we would say today, the low-wage countries . Western Europe's luxury wages would drive jobs away.

For Spengler, the furthest thing is this white Bolshevism - Russia.

The colored world revolution

For Spengler, the second, 'colored' world revolution joins this purely occidental white revolution (although it affects the globe). The threat from within grows through the additional weakening of the West towards the outside.

Who are 'the colored ones'?

Spengler mentions:

New self-confidence

According to Spengler, the wars of the Faustian peoples among each other had a highly encouraging effect among the colored people: Their masses were partly involved in the fighting and could have seen that they were by no means hopelessly inferior to the white masters: “They began to despise the whites like Jugurtha once did mighty Rome. "

The worrying sign is that the whites have given up on natural superiority and don't even notice it.

Economic war

The spearhead of the colored revolution, Russia and Japan, would use low wages and politico-social propaganda as a means of racial struggle against the West. Spengler warned that these tactics had the potential to complete the destruction of Western civilization.

The overall color revolution is clad in very different tendencies. Sometimes the anti-Western struggle is waged under national or under economic or social guidelines. Here it is directed against colonial governments (as in India), there against white upper classes (South America).

Demographic decline

The elementary fertility of colored people has long outstripped the birth rate in the west. Western decadence depresses the desire to have children to an unbearable level. The decline of the white family is in full swing, with the result that the West is gambling away its future. Even more frightening for Spengler is the racial armament of former Faustian peoples like France by millions of black Africans.

Spengler also makes the advent of Western medicine jointly responsible for the excess of births among colored people. Because of this, people no longer die of disease at any age (so that a population pyramid would arise despite the excess births). Instead, more and more people are living up to their maximum life expectancy, which leads to exponential population growth when there is an excess of births.

Linking the Revolutions

Spengler sees the danger of the dangers for the West in the fact that the inner white world revolution could ally with the outer colored world revolution.

Class struggle and race struggle

Class and race struggle have common goals for Spengler: All measures to destroy the Faustian culture are welcome to the revolutionaries on both sides. Spengler therefore expects the agitators of the white and colored revolution to support one another.

Appeal to the will to assert yourself

Spengler still hopes: not so much for the continued existence of the West, because this is already excluded by the inevitability of the cultural collapse. Rather, Spengler thinks about the delay of the physical decline and the stabilization in an empire , as the Romans were able to enforce in antiquity (against the resistance of the other ancient peoples and the alien Germanic tribes).

As in the fall of the West , Spengler's hope is again directed towards the Germans. In his opinion, Germany must learn great politics and establish the 'Endreich', the Germanic-German empire: "Especially in the Germanic race, the strongest-willed that has ever existed, great opportunities still sleep."

reception

Spengler's book was an enormous success. It achieved record sales within a few months. The affront to the meanwhile ruling National Socialists, which the philosopher undertook (certainly not without danger to his life), may have contributed to this.

The Nazis then launched a campaign against Spengler. Johann von Leers Spengler's world-political system and National Socialism condemned Spengler's writing as being directed against the new movement: In it, the awakened Germany experiences the “first really big ideological attack on the National Socialist worldview” (quoted from: Ausg. München: DTV, 1980) .

rating

For many today's readers, Spengler's writing is difficult to read. Their strictly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and partly anti-human tendencies appear antiquated to them as well as suspect (for reasons of historical knowledge) their proximity to fascism .

In the 1950s, the advance of the Bolshevik Revolution as far as East and Central Germany actually made the west of the country, as Spengler wrote, a border region against the East: This complex against the supposedly wild, barbaric East makes it understandable why Bolshevism in the early days Federal Republic of Germany was perceived as 'Asian', for example by Konrad Adenauer .

At the same time, Spengler addresses current issues. Today they are being integrated into the debates about globalization (basically, Spengler describes exactly this phenomenon, albeit fearfully). Everybody is familiar with problems of assertiveness in the face of countries with low social standards. The risk of competition from relocating jobs is even one of the fashionable topics of our time. Early on, he also described the phenomenon "that every socialism that transitions from theory to practice very soon suffocates in bureaucracy".

Likewise, one could see in Spengler's book a first examination of the phenomenon of the clash of civilizations , almost 60 years before Samuel P. Huntington .

expenditure

  • First part, Germany and the development of world history, CH Beck, Munich 1933
  • Munich: CH Beck, 1953
  • Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1961
  • Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1980 (preface by Heinz Friedrich)
  • Graz: Ares Verlag, 2007 (afterword by Frank Lisson)

See also

National Socialism , Racism , Conservative Revolution , Bolshevism , Socialism

literature

  • Anton Mirko Koktanek: Oswald Spengler in his time , Munich: CH Beck, 1968.
  • David Engels : "Today we live 'between times'." The "Years of Decision" and the crisis of the 20th century in Oswald Spengler's historical picture, in: H. Scholten (ed.), The Perception of Krisenphänomenen. Case studies from antiquity to modern times, Cologne 2007, 223–249.
  • Detlef Felken : Oswald Spengler. Conservative thinker between the empire and dictatorship, CH Beck, Munich 1988.

Web links

Wikiquote: Years of Decision  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision, dtv, Munich, 1961, page 18
  2. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 16
  3. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 15
  4. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 24
  5. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, pages 43 and 44
  6. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 47
  7. ↑ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, pages 144 and 145
  8. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 18
  9. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 74
  10. ^ Oswald Spengler: Years of Decision , dtv, Munich, 1961, page 75