Johann von Leers on Spengler’s geopolitical system and National  Socialism

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was, in the thirties of  the last century, already famous for his major work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918,1922), which presented a panoramic view of civilisations as social entities that are born, grow and decay like biological organisms. However, Spengler’s portrayal of World War I as an inevitable change in the cycle of civilisations was rather suspect in the eyes of German nationalists. What was worse was that Spengler’s philosophy of history was an essentially pessimistic one since, according to his doctrine of cycles of civilisations, the West was doomed to decline and  the only solution to the inevitable dissolution was a static adherence to one’s own cultural superiority. Spengler’s conservatism did not really value the maintenance of tradition so much as it wished to accustom Germans to the inevitable transformation of world history into a cosmopolitanism that would eventually be ruled by a universal Caesar. Spengler’s Caesarism may seem prophetic in our century with the advent of the Trumpism in the United States but it was not a notion that could be welcomed by National Socialists.

In 1931 Spengler published another work on Der Mensch und die Technik (Man and Technology) which criticized the spirit of industrialization and predicted that it would lead to the encroachment of Western civilization by ‘coloured races’ that would soon be acquiring the new technological expertise necessary to compete economically and politically with the White nations. All this seemed to accord with National Socialist ideas, except that Spengler was directly opposed to the National Socialist emphasis on race as a determinative biological reality.

The reason for Spengler’s refusal  to accept the racialist biology of the National Socialists was that he was himself of partly Jewish ancestry. Spengler’s maternal great-grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm Grantzow, a tailor’s apprentice in Berlin, had three children out of wedlock with a Jewish woman named Bräunchen Moses ( c. 1769–1849) whom he later married, on 26 May 1799. Of the five children the couple had after their marriage, Gustav Adolf Grantzow (1811–1883) was Oswald Spengler’s maternal grand-father. Given such a background it is not surprising that Spengler did not join the National Socialist party and, when he personally met Hitler in 1933, he reported that he had been unimpressed.

It may be recalled also that Spengler’s economic discussions in his various works do not refer much to the Jewish bases of modern economics. In his work  Preussentum und Sozialismus (Prussianism and Socialism, 1919), for example,  Spengler constantly refers to Marx chiefly as a student and product of English society: ‘Everything that Marx has to say with grudging admiration about “capitalistic society” refers principally to English, and not to a universal, economic instinct.’[1] Spengler’s tacit admiration of Jews is also clear in the Untergang, Vol. II, where he talks of the ‘European Jew with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life’, while in Jahre der Entscheidung he praises Disraeli as one of few statesmen who “possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly.”[2]

Spengler’s last major work Jahre der Entscheidung published in 1933 indeed contained a harsh repudiation of the National Socialist racialist emphases. Arthur Zweiniger wrote a critique of Spengler’s work in 1933 called Spengler im Dritten Reich and this was followed by Leers’ Spenglers weltpolitisches Sytem und der Nationalsozialismus in 1934.

Johann von Leers (1902–1965) was a National Socialist party member from 1929 and was invited by Goebbels in 1933 to work in the propaganda ministry where he produced several books and booklets until 1945 including a study of the Weimar Republic,  14 Jahre Judenrepublik. Die Geschichte eines Rassenkampfes  (1933) and books on National Socialism, Adolf Hitler (1933), Entwicklung des Nationalsozialismus von seinem Anfang bis zur Gegenwart (The development of National Socialism from its beginning to the present,1936) and Jewry, Judentum und Gaunertum (Jewry and the Underworld, 1940), Juden hinter Stalin (Jews behind Stalin, 1941), Die Verbrechernatur der Juden (The criminal nature of the Jews,1944), etc.

While Leers was a racialist like other National Socialists he did not subscribe to Spengler’s narrow view of Aryanism that considered even southern Italians and southern Spaniards as ‘coloureds’. He in fact wrote a perceptive article in 1942 in the journal Die Judenfrage on ‘Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze’[3] which revealed his support of Arab nationalism.

After the war, Leers fled from Germany to Italy, where he lived for five years. In 1950, he emigrated to Argentina, where he edited a journal called Der Weg. Later, in 1956 Leers emigrated to Egypt accepting an invitation by Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian mufti who had been supportive of the Third Reich. Under al-Hussein’s influence Leers converted to Islam and called himself Omar Amin. During the last years of his life Leers served as head of Nasser’s Israeli propaganda unit in Egypt.

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Leers’ anti-Spenglerian work is significant not only for its criticism of Spenglerian historical determinism but also for its revelation of Spengler’s cosmopolitan capitalism. Spengler’s conservatism is, according to Leers, the opposite of the National Socialist concern for the workers of Germany. Leers’ arguments thus remind us of the socialist aspect of National Socialism that was included in the name of the party (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party)—largely ignored by modern historians of the movement.

Leers is, like most National Socialists, opposed to the historical determinism of Spengler’s philosophy of history. Leers points out that this notion was indeed not original with Spengler  since the Russian naturalist and pan-Slavist historian Nikolay Danilevsky (1822–1885) had already propounded such a theory—with greater clarity than Spengler—in his Russia and Europe (1869).  Leers also gives the further example of Karl Marx as a proponent of historical determinism in his theory of the dialectical evolution of societies through economic stimuli. The defect of these historical determinist theories, according to Leers, is that both Marx and Spengler consider history independent of the national character of the people who undergo civilizational changes. Like Hitler, Leers considers the history of the Aryan and German people as dependent on their special character and free from any cyclical developmental processes that are common to all civilisations. Like Hitler too, Leers maintains that miscegenation is what causes the decay of a civilization and not any cyclical principle within a nation as an ‘organism’.

Leers subscribes to the fundamental National Socialist view that the Aryan is the most creative of races and that because of his idealistic readiness to sacrifice his individual ego for the betterment of his community. As Hitler had expressed it in Mein Kampf (1925):

This self-sacrificing will to give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others is most strongly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.

This idealistic attitude ennobles the concept of ‘work’ itself:

Now, for example, [the Aryan] no longer works directly for himself, but with his activity articulates himself with the community, not only for his own advantage, but for the advantage of all. The most wonderful elucidation of this attitude is provided by his word ‘work,’ by which he does not mean an activity for maintaining life in itself, but exclusively a creative effort that does not conflict with the interests of the community. Otherwise he designates human activity, in so far as it serves the instinct of self-preservation without consideration for his fellow men, as theft, usury, robbery, burglary, etc. …

Every worker, every peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity remains hidden in him.

And this is also, according to Hitler, the crucial difference between the Aryan and the Jew:

For if the Jewish people’s instinct of self-preservation is not smaller but larger than that of other peoples, if his intellectual faculties can easily arouse the impression that they are equal to the intellectual gifts of other races, he lacks completely the most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude.

Hitler’s aversion to Russian Bolshevism is also due to the Jewish domination of the Revolution in Russia:

where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great people.

Like Hitler Leers combines the notion of racial distinction with that of German socialism:

[Spengler] does not consider and recognize that the workers, that the millions of our industrial workers, exactly like the other strata of the nation, are bearers of the legacy of the race, of the future of the nation. He sees in them — as in the dusty pages of Manchester Liberalism — only increasingly expensive devourers of the revenue of production.

Leers thus notes the principal difference between the National Socialist ideology and the Spenglerian:

Behind Oswald Spengler’s heroic slogan is hidden an icy contempt for the people, behind the  seduction of his pseudo-Prussian slogans appears the rule of a leader whom he envisages as detached from the people — in the place of Adolf Hitler a Caesar who will force the German workers to  the living standards of negro workforces, in the place of a reliable cooperation of productive nations the unrestrained rule of ‘economic leaders’ and Caesars,  in the place of the Nordic light-bearing race the beast of prey – that is the Spenglerian idea.

As an anti-socialist Spengler was particularly angered by the increased wages of workers that have resulted from recent workers’ agitations, for that, according to him, debilitates the national economy:

Spengler is of the conviction that the ‘high’ wages of the German workers, especially of the ‘white workers’, make the product made here uncompetitive on the world market. He is of the conviction that these wares burdened with ‘high’ wages cannot be maintained in comparison to the competition of non-European continents.

Leers particularly criticizes Spengler for his attack on the trade unions along with his contempt of the workers in general:

The existence of the alliances of working men against the amalgamation of money, the existence of a desire to rise among the creative men of the German nation that manifested itself even under a Marxist form, enraged Spengler. … For him it was not a matter of the creation of a German Socialism. For him it was not a matter of the incorporation of the working class into the nation, for him indeed it was not a matter of a real national community.

However, Leers fails to note what Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, that the trade unions were dominated by Jews. As Hitler had remarked,

the Jewish leadership in trade-union affairs remains uncontested. … In keeping with all his inner rapacious brutality, he at once teaches the trade-union movement the most brutal use of violence.

Nevertheless, Leers endorses the trade union idea as one that unites the workers against the capitalists, who are for Leers the chief enemy:

It is not the worker or even his Marxist leaders who are solely to blame but the guilt of the propertied strata, the guilt  of their capitalist leaders —- who have also conducted an equally resolute class struggle but were just cunning enough not to speak much of it — is at least as great.

By contrast, Leers points out that Spengler is, in general, in favour of the capitalists:

Here the counter-revolution is being ideologically prepared! Here the weapons are being forged to set up, in the place of a state of creative work, of National Socialism and the German community, a tyrannical state of big capital with a Caesarean leadership supported by mercenaries and without any connection to the vital national community.

Spengler is thus opposed to German socialism as much as he is to Bolshevism:

In their social rise, in their will to rise socially he sees only a burdening of the ‘national economy’. If the youth of the nation, even of the strata not belonging to the industrial workers, consider the solution of the workers’ question as a moral duty and the economic uplift of the industrial worker as their comradely obligation, Oswald Spengler wishes to see therein ‘half Bolshevist’ currents.

Spengler’s opposition to socialism is so extreme that he even opposes the Youth movements in National Socialist Germany as being ‘Asiatic’ forms of collectivism that go against the individualistic character of the Germans:

It is the impersonal Asiatic collectivism of the East, the spirit of great levelling in combination with the Western levée en masse of 1792.

Spengler’s well-known criticism of parliamentarism is also seen to be not a tool of socialist thought such as that of the National Socialists but a bourgeois ruse wherewith capitalism could entrench itself in the state at the expense of the national community and especially of its workers. Spengler is indeed opposed to any form of state socialism which he considers as differing little from Communism. As he said:

[The economic leader] wants economic State Socialism, the suppression of private initiative, a planned economy, all of which is fundamentally the same thing, that is, Communism.

Leers’ major complaint against Spengler’s economic theories is that they are not based on the ‘national economy’:

[It is] not an economy that is conducted for the nation and in the interest of the nation, but something quite detached, something that occurs without relation to the living national body. For him there is no workers’ question nor the compulsion to maintain the masses of millions of healthy and poor national comrades not only economically but also to allow them to participate in the largest numbers in the spiritual life of the nation (and even if that were only so that they do not leave this nation in the lurch in the hour of danger).

More alarming is the fact that Spengler does not really work towards any change in the status quo:

His idea of the economy is a very simple one: “Every person, like every animal, has to defend himself against an unpredictable fate or else bear it. Everybody has his personal care, full responsibility for himself, the need to fight for himself and his own goals in all dangers on the basis of his own decision.”

It is clear that this Nietzschean aspect of Spengler’s doctrine is indeed the basis of his secret championing of Caesarism.

Leers goes on to emphasise that Spengler’s state is indeed a ruthless bourgeois one that has little sympathy for the working class:

The one born for rule can use them but he despises them.’ They may naturally shoot themselves for him … He has no idea of the comradely disposition between the leader and his followers, the common service to the people and the country is foreign to him. His vision goes farther, the Spengler state does not need a national chancellor and a beloved leader – he calls for a Caesar, a predator king.

What is startling is that the Spengler’s admiration of ‘Prussianism’ in his “Preussentum und Sozialismus” is merged with his secret extolment of Caesarism. As Spengler put it:

As a  form-giving power there remains only the ‘Prussian’ spirit, everywhere, not just in Germany. Destiny, once agglomerated in momentous forms and great traditions, will make history in the shape of formless autocracies. The legions of Caesar awake once again.

Thus Leers declares:

[H]ere the confused and capitalist imperialism  of the pre-war period mirroring itself once again separates itself clearly from the nationalism based on cultivation and construction of national culture as Adolf Hitler represents it. Even here Spengler is the man of the strata living on export at any cost, of the imperialistic rule of the world. Even here he is, just as in his opposition to the worker, a West European imperialist of the pre-war period who goes to the logical extreme but not a nationalist, let alone a National Socialist.

Leers contrasts Spengler’s Caesarism with his own view of National Socialism as a movement not for imperialistic expansion such as the Western powers had long indulged in but for nationalistic consolidation.

The ultimate danger that this imperialism poses is the debilitation of the creative forces of the nation:

In the midst of the ethnic awakening [the Spenglerians] approach the new Germany with the idols of a fallen age and direct it onto paths on which their profit may flourish a little but which would at the same time be the end of the creative race in our nation.

Spengler’s fears of socialism are inextricably linked to his fears of the impending rise of coloured nations with newly acquired technology:

For behind the world wars and the proletarian world revolution that has not yet been concluded emerges the greatest of all dangers, the coloured, and everything that is still connected to “race” among the white peoples will be necessary to confront it …

Leers, on the other hand, sees through Spengler’s appeals to the “white race” as being a mere pretext for capitalist imperialism, in which Germany has no major role to play:

To these coloured peoples Spengler opposes the ‘imperium of the white nations’. By this he clearly understands in the first place the English and French, as well as North American, colonial rule. In it he sees the rule of the ‘white man’ in the world. That Germany has no part in it is, for him, not a reason not to champion its maintenance passionately.

Spengler points to the Bolshevik Revolution as a sign of the rise of the “Asiatic,” Mongol race in revolt against European Russians. But Leers believes that, just as the Germans defeated the Socialist Weimar Republic, they should be able to withstand the Bolshevism of the Russians and even cooperate with the latter so long as neither country interfered in the affairs of the other.

As for Japan, the other fear of Spengler, Leers points to the case of the nationalist war minister  of Japan, Araki, who displayed conservative tendencies that strongly resembled those of the National Socialists. Leers is, in fact, more generous to non-European races than Hitler, who in Mein Kampf had declared;

If beginning today all further Aryan influence on Japan should stop, assuming that Europe and America should perish, Japan’s present rise in science and technology might continue for a short time; but even in a few years the well would dry up, the Japanese special character would gain, but the present culture would freeze and sink back into the slumber from which it was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan culture.[4]

On the whole, Leers considers the general grouping of nations into “white nations” and “coloured nations” as both imprecise and historically useless since Germany itself had not benefited from colonialism in its history and would have suffered more from the Western imperialist powers if the latter had not been distracted from continental problems by their overseas colonies. So, unlike Spengler, he sees no need to defend the other “white nations” in the fight against rising independence movements.

That Leers was sympathetic to other races is evident also in his post-war collaboration with the Egyptians and in his correspondence, where a letter to an unidentified African written in 1955[5] expresses his interest in the American Africanist W.E.B. Dubois’ histories of the African peoples and wishes the negroes success in their efforts to obtain civil rights. He points to the German colonial experience as being quite beneficial to the natives and highlights the case of Jewish financial interests spurring the British against the Germans in Southwest Africa.

As far as Germany’s own territorial ambitions, Leers believes that they should be restricted to the European geographical space in which Germany finds itself:

The real interests of the German nation do not signify for Germany an imperialist battle in alien continents for foreign master races but a peaceful and federalist collection of nations in the eastern and central European space. This is necessary also in an economic sense.

Spengler opposed the migration of German industries and workers to lands that have cheap labour but suggested that international competition can be offset only by reducing the German worker’s ‘luxury wages’. But this would be impossible since German workers cannot live in a lifestyle that is common in less developed countries. This is, for Leers, a further example of Spengler’s disregard for the welfare of the German workers.

Leers exposes the imperialistic economics of the Western powers by pointing to the desire to rule colonial peoples by selling them cheap, low-quality products. Germany, on the other hand, has no imperialistic ambitions and should not trade in cheap products that it can manufacture at home but only import commodities that Germany does not possess and in return export specialized, high-quality products that it manufactures.

Leers concludes his critique of Spengler with a reminder of the essential question that Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung raises:

Should National Socialism be the final form of the German nation and develop itself further organically into an ethnic state of Germans or should National Socialism be replaced by a Caesarean rule that, with mercenary troops, socially suppresses the masses of workers of the nation into the depths and conducts an imperialistic great power politics?

The real danger in the Spenglerian ideology is indeed that

in the long term, after the defeat of Marxism on the left, a “Marxism turned on its head,” a sort of Marxism of wealth, should succeed  in crippling the realization of the National Socialist will in such a way that finally an ossification results. There are many examples of a refined counter-revolution that is seldom carried out at the barricades but much rather fights with intellectual and financial weapons succeeding in crippling revolutionary resurgences.

[1] Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism and other essays, translated by D.O. White.

[2] The Hour of Decision, Part I: Germany and World-historical Evolution, translated by C.F. Atkinson.

[3] See my translation ‘Johann von Leers: ‘Judaism and Islam as Opposites (1942)’, Occidental Observer, September 24, 2024.

[4] Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Mannheim.

[5] https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b144-i264