14 - André Malraux and Oswald Spengler: The Poetics of Metamorphosis

Summary

The twentieth century experienced two world wars that caused an enormous loss of human life. The First World War traumatized participants to the extent that the nations involved in the conflict emerged fundamentally changed from the experience. It was this trauma that prompted Oswald Spengler to write his monumental Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), the first edition of which appeared in 1918, a revised edition following in 1922. The Decline of the West is ostensibly a work of cultural history; however, the fact that parts of it are written in a lyrical, semi-poetic style, and that there are hints that some transmission of knowledge, values, and concerns from one culture to another might be possible, suggests that it may have more in common with André Malraux's highly original autobiographical work, Antimémoires (1967–72) than is generally supposed.

Spengler's morphological survey of cultures and civilizations from the Egyptian pre-cultural period of 3400 BC to AD 2200 casts a generally pessimistic look at the way in which, according to the author, the values of one “culture,” defined as the “actualizing and form of a single, singularly constituted [einzigartig] soul,” cannot be understood or transmitted to another (Untergang I, 169/Decline I, 129):

Denn jede Kultur hat ihre eigne Zivilisation. Zum ersten Male werden hier die beiden Worte, die bis jetzt einen unbestimmten Unterschied ethischer Art zu bezeichnen hatten, in periodischem Sinne, als Ausdrücke für ein strenges und notwendiges organisches Nacheinander gefaßt. […]