First editions, first impressions, of Spengler’s magnum opus, a comparative study of the fall of history’s great cultures in which he predicted the collapse of Western civilisation. The first volume is the scarce true first published by Braumüller in 1918; both it and the second volume are uncut in the original wrappers, and are accompanied here by the separately issued index volume.
Despite many rejections, the then-obscure historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) eventually succeeded in finding a publisher for Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The Viennese publishing house Wilhelm Braumüller issued the first volume in January 1918 but, anticipating poor sales, printed just 1,500 copies. After its immense popular success and a second edition, Spengler switched to the Münich-based publisher C. H. Beck for the publication of all his later works, including the second volume.
Spengler “contended that all civilisations, like every living organism, pass through a predetermined ‘life cycle’ of prime, maturity and decay, and that this trend can be neither halted nor reversed. Spengler distinguished eight civilisations which, independent of one another, have run this course: Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Arabic, Mexican and Western. The outlook for western civilisation, to Spengler, is gloomy. The end is at hand. Democracy, the typical product of western civilisation, will be wiped out by caesarean autocracy. The tremendous success of the book among the semi-literate, especially in Germany and America, during the period after the First World War, is a politico-sociological phenomenon that has nothing to do with the intrinsic merits or demerits of this ‘new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny’, as the author himself described the aim of his book ... Every responsible historian repudiated Spengler’s theory; but it offered a plausible pseudo-scientific basis to the innate propensity of the German for ascribing to an inexorable fate what they refused to acknowledge as their own shortcoming and failures; and it confirmed the Americans in their complacent belief that ‘the West’ (which they equated with the Old World) was in fact ‘finished’” (PMM). The title of the English translation - The Twilight of the West (1922) - lacked the same portentous impact: it “entirely fails to convey Spengler’s deliberately emotional implications of a Wagnerian twilight of the gods and the crack of impeding doom” (ibid.).
The first volume, rather than being firmly sewn in gatherings like most continental books of the period, is held together by the lightest application of glue along the backstrip, with the resulting loosening of some leaves within each quire. In spite of this, the book is in a very good state of preservation, entirely uncut and clean. The second volume, with the “first through fifth thousand” statement on the title page, is also sometimes encountered in cloth-backed paper-covered boards and a matching dust jacket.
