Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 at Blankenburg in the Harz mountains, the son of a postal official. He studied mathematics, natural science, philosophy and history at Munich, Berlin and Halle, took his doctorate with a thesis on Heraclitus, and taught for some years in secondary schools in Hamburg and elsewhere. At thirty-one, when his mother's death left him a small inheritance, he gave up teaching and lived a frugal, solitary life in Munich devoted to writing. During the First World War, in a dim flat, he wrote The Decline of the West; the first volume appeared in 1918, the year of Germany's defeat, and so matched the disillusioned mood of post-war Germany that it became a sensation and made him famous at once. In his last years he kept his distance from the Nazis and refused their overtures, and he died of a heart attack in Munich at fifty-five.