Prussian Socialism & Other Essays Read online

  Prussian Socialism & Other Essays

  by Oswald Spengler

  Annotated and Introduced by

  K R Bolton

  Prussian Socialism & Other Essays

  by Oswald Spengler

  Annotated and Introduced by K R Bolton

  Copyright © 2018 Black House Publishing Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Table of Contents

  Prussian Socialism

  Oswald Spengler An Introduction to His Life and Work

  Early Life

  Decline of the West

  Pessimism?

  German Socialism

  Ruling Circles

  The Sterility of Late Civilization

  Hour of Decision

  Political Writings

  Foreword

  Prussianism and Socialism

  Introduction

  I. The Revolution

  II. Socialism as a Way of Life

  III. Prussians and Englishmen

  IV. Marx

  V. The International

  The Two Faces of Russia and Germany’s Eastern Problems

  Pessimism?

  The German National Character

  Introduction to Decline of the Birth Rate by Richard Korherr

  Nietzsche And His Century

  Tasks of the Nobility

  Political Duties of German Youth

  Building of the New German Reich

  1. The Swamp

  2. Civil Service and Personality

  3. Education - Breeding or Education?

  4. Rights as a Result of Duties

  5. The German Currency

  6. Against Steuerbschewism

  7. Work and Property

  8. The World Situation

  Is World Peace Possible?

  Oswald Spengler

  Oswald Spengler An Introduction to His Life and Work

  For the Right one might disagree with Oswald Spengler, but one cannot ignore him. Of course, for the Left and orthodox academia, the simplistic option is to ignore him. Spengler continues to pose a challenge, and his great questions of our epoch have yet to be fully answered. But it is essential that the questions are at least asked.

  One of the outstanding features of Spengler’s morphological theory of history is that it is unfolding before our eyes, at every moment. While saying something is “self-evident” might be – and generally is – a method of claiming one is correct without recourse to evidence, I would challenge anyone who knows at least the fundamentals of Spengler’s cultural morphology to look around their own society, perhaps even their own immediate environs, and deny that Spengler is right.

  Early Life

  Oswald Spengler was born in Harz, Germany, on the 29 May 1880, the only son and eldest of four children, from a paternal line of mine workers – although the father was a postal official when Oswald was born - and a mother with artistic abilities.1 The father Bernhard, was a loyal Prussian, but politics and reading were not part of the household. Young Spengler, however, at an early age devoured the literature of Goethe and Schiller, and later Shakespeare, Heine, Dostoevsky, et al.2

  In 1890 the family moved to the university city of Halle, where Oswald received a classical education, studying Latin, Greek, mathematics and the natural sciences. From his mother’s side, he developed an affinity for the arts, particularly that of drama, poetry and music.

  Even as a 14 year old, while writing plays, stories and poems, Spengler was starting to think about the great issues. Hence, in 1894 he wrote an essay entitled ‘Greater Germany: New Order in Europe and the Rest of the World’.3

  It seems that it was already while a student at the Gymnasium that Spengler first came under the enduring influence of the philosophers Goethe and Nietzsche.4 In the preface to The Decline of The West Spengler acknowledges the debt he owes to them: ‘and now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty…’5

  Spengler entered the University of Munich in 1901, the year of his father’s death, and proceeded to Berlin and to Halle. His main courses of study remained the Classical cultures, mathematics and the physical sciences. At Halle he prepared his doctoral dissertation on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, receiving his Doctorate in 1904. He wrote a secondary dissertation required for becoming a High School teacher. The subject was ‘The Development of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom’.6

  He taught mathematics, physical sciences, history and German literature at Saarbrücken, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. He was a good teacher, whose style, according to former students, was both lively and ‘intuitive’.7 However, in 1910, coming into an inheritance from his mother, he left the profession and started his life as an independent scholar, settling in Munich in 1911.8

  Decline of the West

  Here Spengler started to write a book of observations on the political situation, to be entitled Conservative and Liberal. However, this developed far beyond the original intention, and became The Decline of The West. The First World War confirmed his analysis. He lived in reduced circumstances due to losses of investments, working by candlelight in cheap lodgings, and writing as a ‘cultural adviser’ for the press.9

  Despite the war time hardships by 1917 the first volume of his philosophical masterpiece, ‘Form and Actuality’, was ready, and was published the following year.10 The volume was an immediate success.

  Professional historians were offended by the presumptuousness of Spengler – not being a trained historian - offering a work of such magnitude. Yet, Spengler was looking at history from the heights, and not from beneath the quagmire of formal academia. Stimely makes a comment that remains pertinent: “[W]ith regard to the validity of his postulate of rapid Western decline, the contemporary Spenglerian need only say to these critics: Look about you. What do you see?”11

  To the defeated Germans, The Decline of The West put their predicament into world-historical context, and also offered a vision for the future of Western Civilisation as a unified cultural organism. So with such promise, a second, revised edition of The Decline of The West, Volume One, was published in 1922, soon followed by the second volume, “Perspectives of World-History.”12

  Despite the professional critics, there were scholars of note who immediately spoke in favour of Spengler. His English translator, Charles Francis Atkinson, writing in the “translator’s preface” for the 1926 English edition of The Decline of the West, refers to an article by Dr Eduard Meyer, a scholar of ancient history of worldwide repute, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung in 1924 in which Meyer, in contrast to what Atkinson calls “the first burst of criticism,” “insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler’s ideas.”13 The two remained friends until Meyer’s death in 1930.

  Spengler also maintained an exchange of ideas with many other scholars in the study of Civilisations. Hans Erich Stier, Professor of Ancient History, assured Spengler that, despite “the original perplexity,” his thought has “exerted a great influence everywhere,” and was being imitated widely by historical scholars.14

  Pessimism?

  Regardless of Spengler’s persistent ill-health and long periods of scholarly solitude, he
sought to directly influence political events. Despite the criticism of “pessimism” or “fatalism” that continues to be levelled at Spengler, he did not see this in his historical morphology, and one might say that because all mortals are fated to die, one might as well give up without living whatever life’s course that might unfold. So it is with Cultures, according to Spengler, and the scholar sought to influence events politically.

  Spengler had addressed the misunderstanding of “pessimism” as early as 1921 when he replied to those who saw his outlook as a prophesy of “dreadful catastrophe,” writing of The Decline of The West: “My title does not imply catastrophe. Perhaps we could eliminate the ‘pessimism’ without altering the real sense of the title if we were to substitute for ‘decline’ the word ‘fulfilment’’…”15

  It was from Germany, re-imbued with the Prussian élan, from which the 20th century revival of Western Civilisation had to proceed in answer to 19th century English political-economics. However, Spengler was not an agitator, an organiser, a man of party politics or of mass movements. He sought to influence those who might take Germany, and thereby The West, into new directions.

  Over the period 1914 to 1917, while engaged in writing The Decline, Spengler continued to write other material of a historical-political nature, including an essay, To the German Nobility, calling for a monarchist regime and a system of government that would raise a meritocracy, while eschewing parliament as the means by which the newspaper reading public believes that it is politically empowered.16

  German Socialism

  Despite the initial difficulty in finding a publisher, the defeat of Germany garnered The Decline of The West much interest in the aftermath of the war, and Spengler suddenly became a widely respected philosopher, receiving the Nietzsche Archives Award in 1919. That year he gave a speech entitled Prussianism and Socialism, which was published as a pamphlet under that title, extolling the Prussian ethos of duty to the State as a true form of anti-capitalist “socialism,” not only Prussian, but now required for a universal Western resurgence. This Prussian ethical socialism or what we might call Duty, Spengler contrasted with Marxian “socialism,” which is nothing other than a mirror image of English economics, aiming to replace one ownership class with another, while maintaining the same 19th century zeitgeist of money-thinking.

  Prussian and Socialism explicates a number of issues that were also explained in the final chapters of the second volume of The Decline of The West, which was not published until 1922; i.e., four years after the publication of volume one. Prussianism and Socialism, like other published speeches such as The Political Duties of German Youth and Reconstruction of the German Reich (both 1924), and Spengler’s final book, The Hour of Decision (1934), are intended as a practical philosophy to inspire new thinking and prompt action in the political realm, addressed to youth, workers, aristocrats and industrialists. Spengler explained that socialism was not Marxism, and that socialism was the same as the “spirit of Old Prussia.”17

  In the same vein, among the final paragraphs of Volume II of The Decline of The West, Spengler concludes with an impassioned appeal. He calls for The West to overthrow the dictature of Money. Spengler defined “Capitalism” as the “money-powers” that see politics and laws as nothing other than the means for personal acquisition. Socialism is “the will to call into life a mighty politico–economic order that transcends all class interests.”18

  Spengler’s thinking had a major influence on Otto and Gregor Strasser, luminaries of the North German region of the Nazi party, and while Otto soon went his own way, Gregor, whom Spengler greatly respected, unsuccessfully sought Spengler’s support for the NSDAP.19

  Ruling Circles

  With Spengler’s rejection of party politicking, demagoguery and mass movements, and his cultivation of those already in positions of influence or potentially so, within industry, politics and academia, it is apparent that what Spengler was aiming for was a “revolution from above,” a shift of perception within ruling circles.

  During the 1920s Spengler was widely sought as a lecturer. In 1921 he read a paper on “Philosophical considerations on the economy,” organised by his close collaborator and friend, the influential industrialist Paul Reusch,20 head of Gutehoffnungshütte (Good Hope Mill), a leading mining and engineering firm in the Ruhr, and president of the German Chamber of Commerce. In 1927 Reusch founded the Ruhrlade, a covert society, which raised money for conservative parties and sought their unification.

  In 1922 Crown Prince William wrote to Spengler in appreciation for the second volume of The Decline of The West, which he was “studying with the greatest interest.”21 Spengler’s ideas seem to have been of much interest among the deposed Royal Family, and in 1925 for example, the Kaiserine Hermine asked if she could meet Spengler.22 He had visited Crown Prince William in Holland in 1923.23

  At this time Spengler had become completely disaffected with Chancellor Stresemann, writing to conservative journalist and author Gerhard von Janson that at his request several newspapers had “started a strong personal polemic against Stresemann,” and asking von Janson to launch a campaign in Berlin and the provincial Press. He now started uncharacteristically advocating the formation of a new political party based on elements from the German National Party and the Centrum party, and leaders from agriculture and industry24 He also sought a vigorous campaign against the Stresemann administration from the German Fatherland Party, regarding the Stresemann party as bargaining with the Socialists to maintain “this dictatorship of business politicians.”25

  With the Hitler-Ludendorff Munich Putsch of November 1923, Spengler felt that his warnings since 1921 that the nationalist movement should pursue a “reasonable direction” and that there should have been sounder guidance, were validated. He castigated the lack of direction of the “national movement” for not having critiqued the Hitler-Ludendorff movement, while they had nonetheless remained aloof from the NSDAP, Spengler stating, “the tactic of approving silence was tantamount to help.”26

  Spengler was of course greatly interested in the Hitler case being heard in Munich, his city of residence, in February 1924.27 He commented to his sister, Hilde Kornhardt, that Ludendorff had “frustrated the arrangements made to prevent secret matters coming out in court,” in regard to the broader Rightist connections of the NSDAP. Another concern was Ludendorff’s anti-Church stance which was alienating Catholics from the Right.28

  A luminary of the Right much interested in Spengler’s views was the industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party. Other important contacts included Seldte, founder of the Stahlhelm paramilitary veterans movement, and the widely read Conservative Revolutionary novelist Ernst Junger.

  The Sterility of Late Civilization

  In April 1925 Benito Mussolini wrote thanking Spengler for his Der Staat, Die Wirtschaft, Neibau des Deuschen Reiches and Politische Pflichten des Deuscthen Jugend, which the Duce assured Spengler he would read ‘with great pleasure’.29 Since 1923 Spengler had noted Mussolini’s opposition to French foreign policy, and sought contact with Italian governmental circles.30 Spengler’s view of Mussolini seems ambivalent however, writing to his sister Hilde Kornhardt, while on holiday in Rome in 1929, of Mussolini as the “woolly lamb” who “suns himself in the lustre of beautiful speeches [while] in the background everybody curses.”31 This seems to have reflected Spengler’s distrust of mass movements including those on the Right.

  Where Spengler’s ideas seem to have impacted Mussolini and Italy most distinctly was in the warning that population decline is a symptom of cultural decay. The end of the drama of a civilisation is epitomised by the sterility of civilised man:

  “The last man of the world city no longer wants to live – he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the famil
y and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relationship in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom…”32

  The peasant is rooted to the soil as a “descendent of his forebears and as the forbear of future descendants.” For the “last men”, “all this is past and gone.”33 This primeval urge to family-continuity is as strong in the aristocracy as in the peasant, we might add, and Spengler notes that “the prudent limitation of life” was deplored by the more far-sighted of Rome’s thinkers and statesmen, who sought unsuccessfully to reverse the process. It is the present population decline of The West that signals more than any other single factor Spengler’s morphology unfolding before us.34

  It is to this depopulation that Mussolini addressed himself, a primary influence on Fascist population doctrine being Dr Richard Korherr. An expert on population statistics, Korherr is remembered today as the “infamous” author of the Korherr Report (1943) on the Jewish populations of Europe, prepared for the SS in his capacity as Inspector of Statistics. We might better appreciate him however as an expert on population decline, who was never a Nazi.35 The report shows that European Jewry had long undergone a natural population decline, although any such statistics are now interpreted as evidence for genocide. However, Korherr could not be found guilty of any crime even by the post-1945 mass lynching party, and he pursued an academic career in post-War Germany, dying in 1989.

  Korherr had contacted Spengler in 1926, addressing him “Highly honoured Master!” He had read The Decline of The West in 1920, and had “not been able to escape from its spell.” In 1925 he made Spengler’s magnum opus the basis of his doctoral thesis, Geburtenrückgang (“Decline of the Birth Rate”), and sought Spengler’s permission to dedicate it to him as “the greatest thinker of our time.”36 Spengler replied that having read the thesis he accepted the dedication with his “best thanks,” adding: “I will tell you honestly that up to now I have read nothing which has completed and deepened a suggestion in my book into such knowledge and understanding.”37