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Oswald (Otto) Spengler
(May 29, 1880 - May 8, 1936) Germany

Otto Spengler

Gay rights advocate

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Oswald Spengler was an historian and critic of the Third Reich, who at first supported National Socialism. Disillusioned by Nazi racial policies, he favored the assimilation of the Jews and disdained the glorification of the "Volk", (idealized German nationals).This left him isolated in the racist Reich. He died in May 1936

Oswald Spengler was born in Blankenburg am Harz. From 1908 to 1911, he was senior high school teacher in Hamburg and then a freelance writer in Munich. His most famous work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), was originally conceived in 1911 as a critique of German foreign policy in the late Wilhelminian era.

Spengler's work, published between 1918 and 1922, made a tremendous impression, coming as they did in the wake of the German defeat. In subsequent political polemics like Preussentum und Sozialismus (1920), which called for an alliance between classical Prussianism and the non - Marxist working - class elite, Spengler tried to persuade public opinion in the direction of the 'conservative revolution'.

As a severe critic of the Weimar Republic and liberal parliamentary democracy (which he considered an imported English ideology alien to German tradition), Spengler supplied the radical Right and the Nazis with powerful ammunition and helped create a mood favorable to their ascent to power. In 1933, Spengler published Jahre der Entscheidung (Years of Decision), which welcomed the national revolution as a liberation of 'the deepest instincts in our blood'.

But, though initially he saw in National Socialism a 'mighty phenomenon', he was quickly disillusioned by Hitler and by the Nazi racial doctrines which he regarded as childish nonsense. Spengler openly rejected the violent anti-semitism of the Nazis, remaining one of the very few right-wing thinkers who favored the assimilation of the Jews.

The Nazis, in turn, objected to Spengler's pessimistic determinism, to his conservative elitism and his evident disdain for the Volk. Increasingly, he found himself isolated in the new German Reich which he had prophesied, out of touch and unable to identify with goals of its political leadership. He died in Munich.

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Source: Who's Who in Nazi Germany, ©1982, Wiederfield and Nicolsa, London

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