Munich and discuss German affairs with inhabitants of the other hemisphere. I write this letter; it is carried over the rolling wilderness of the ocean; on the other side it is translated into the language of Poe, Emerson, and Whitman. And my words will be followed with friendliness and sympathy by a bold and kindly-disposed type of mankind which is in many ways remarkable for its qualities of body and spirit. That is beautiful. A contenting waft of humanity comes over me at the thought of such bonds and such comradeship. And perhaps it is feelings, moods, and leanings of this sort which make me resent that doctrine of history and "biology of culture" full of stony scepticism and false rigour with which a strong mind has recently jolted us, and according to which "mankind" becomes again nothing but a hollow word without meaning; while history is simply a life-process of biological units or cultures which develop restlessly in obedience to set laws and entirely beyond the determination of man.
I have in mind the great work of Oswald Spengler, that two-volume colossus of which the crassly catastrophic title (Der Untergang des Abendlandes; Decay, or "Setting" of the Occident) has surely already reached the ears of the American public; for the din which its appearance occasioned here was strong enough to carry even across the ocean. This book is a gigantic success; and since America likes to hear of gigantic successes I shall be content with this as the first subject to come under my pen. The earlier volume was exhausted soon after its appearance, and the author is now withholding it from further circulation until he has made improvements in it. But the second, which came out a few weeks ago, has already sold 70,000 copies—which for German conditions is a very high figure, especially if one takes into account that we are not dealing with a so-called entertaining production, a novel, but with a profound philosophic work bearing the frightfully learned subtitle: Attempt at a Morphology of World-History. So that leaving aside all considerations of disagreement, one may look even with a national pride on a success for which, perhaps, conditions were no better fitted anywhere else than in Germany.
We are an uprooted people. The catastrophes which have befallen us; the war; the overthrow of a governmental system which we had considered impregnable, aere perennius; further, economic and social readjustments of the most radical nature . . . in
