"German Foolishness" and the "Prophet of Doom": Oswald Spengler and the Inter-war British Press

Chapter (PDF Available) · August 2013 DOI: 10.13109/9783666101267.157

In book: Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen. Der Transfer der Kultur- und Geschichtsmorphologie im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit (1919-1939), Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Editors: Zaur Gasimov, Carl Antonius Lemke Duque, pp.157-184

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the public discourse about Oswald Spengler's ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the »cultural morphology« he developed in his two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (translated into English in the second half of the 1920s as Decline of the West). Previous work has suggested that Spengler’s work was greeted in Britain, overall, with measured scepticism, although there were some individual enthusiasts. Beyond such generalisations, however, there has so far been no systematic analysis of Spengler's British public reception in the two decades following the publication of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. As signalled in my title, I focus on press sources. These provide insight into three questions: how were Spengler's ideas described? With what other concepts or characteristics were they associated? How were patterns in their reception related to the cultural and political context of inter-war Britain? There was a focus across the period on what can be labelled Spengler's »organicism«, »relativism« and »determinism«. Moreover, Spengler's reception was also shaped by topics that were not specifically methodological: his erudition, pessimism, Germanness, advocacy of »Prussianism« and associations with Nazism.